In the spring of 1986, Margaret Thatcher received an urgent
and secret request from the American President.
Ronald Reagan asked her to let him use British air bases
for an attack on the Libyan President, Colonel Gaddafi.
The Prime Minister agreed.
France and other European allies had refused.
It had the effect of cementing the Anglo-American alliance.
There's another point.
What's the good of having bases if when you want to use them,
you're not allowed to, by the home country.
It made America realise that Britain was her real and true friend,
erm, when they were hard up against it and wanted something,
and that no-one else in Europe was.
They're a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know. Weak. Feeble.
Mrs Thatcher's support for the raid on Tripoli was a potent sign
of her respect for the special relationship between Britain
and the United States,
and her disregard for Europe.
But the attack in reprisal for Libyan terrorism
caused deep unease on all sides in Britain.
I opposed the bombing of Libya
because it was a blatant breach of international law.
It was an attempt to kill the ruler of a state with which
we had diplomatic relations. It was also a failure.
And it did us enormous harm in the rest of the Arab world.
She did give the world the impression that when Reagan
said jump, she would ask how high?
Many of Margaret Thatcher's colleagues shared the Labour Party's
hostility to the raid.
They saw it as typical of the Prime Minister's disregard for Cabinet
government and her increasingly Presidential style.
Some learned of the raid only as the planes returned.
The Libyan bombing came as much of a surprise to me
as it did to anybody else.
And as the news began to come through, I was in a quite
difficult position, because I didn't know what was going on.
Mrs Thatcher was being widely accused
of being a poodle of President Reagan.
And I felt that if the operation were to be conducted at all,
that it would have been wiser, had British aircraft taken
part in it as well, so that it would be a joint operation,
rather than one which could be shown,
or one that could be described as us acting in a subservient role.
The Reagans' Ranch high in the mountains
above Santa Barbara, California. Thank you. Oh, Margaret!
We're like explorers! We are so sorry that... Lovely to see you!
Wonderful! How are you? I'm fine, how are you? We're so sorry...
Margaret Thatcher has always enjoyed
a warm friendship with the Republican President, Ronald Reagan,
and his wife Nancy.
It was quite tiring last night, wasn't it? Quite tiring last night.
Yes, yes. Yes, it was. This is fabulous.
They shared the same right-wing philosophy - a belief in the
free market, low taxes, minimum government and a strong defence.
A mac and an umbrella is compulsory for visiting America!
Ronald Reagan had first been impressed by Margaret Thatcher
when she was a junior minister in Edward Heath's government.
Lord somebody or the other came over to me there and he said,
well, what did you think of our Miss Thatcher?
And I told him in no uncertain terms, what I did.
And the last sentence of my remarks were,
I think she'd make a magnificent Prime Minister.
And he said, "Oh, my dear fellow, a WOMAN Prime Minister?!"
And I said, "Well, you had a queen named Victoria who did rather well."
And he said, "Jove, I'd forgotten all about that."
When in power, the two leaders developed a diplomatic love affair.
Each one vying to outdo the other's praise.
We share so many of the same goals and a determination to achieve them,
which you summed up so well and alas, I cannot imitate this
wonderful American English accent, you ain't seen nothin' yet! SHE LAUGHS
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Based on the career that I once had before this one,
you are a very tough act to follow!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
On a trip to the States in 1986,
Mrs Thatcher addressed a seminar on arms control.
What followed was vintage Thatcher.
Mrs Thatcher saw this as an opportunity to get HER views
across to a very large number of American officials, serried
ranks of them, indeed, sitting on the other side of the table.
And she was never one to pass up that sort of opportunity.
And she talked and she talked and she talked,
and she really made sure that her views got across, and to make
doubly sure, she repeated them again, and probably a third time.
And after about ten minutes, I'm sitting outside with Reagan,
and I notice out of corner of my eyes, that there's
Reagan kind of inhaling and ready to talk, wanting to talk,
and Margaret Thatcher says, "One minute, Ronnie,
"let me just finish this."
And I remember the other side looking increasingly
shell-shocked as wave after wave of Thatcher views came pouring over the
table, hordes of them. It was quite an experience for them, I think.
I remember walking away from the meeting afterwards,
and someone turning to Reagan as he walked down the hallway
and saying, "Boy, she's not a very good listener, is she?"
And Reagan - face lights up, turns to this person, says,
"No, but she's a marvellous talker!"
Above all, the two leaders felt they had a sacred mission to defeat
communism and its bastion, the Soviet Union.
Up to that time,
the whole doctrine had been one of contain communism.
That wasn't enough for Ronald Reagan and me.
We thought, the free world was by far the best way to live,
the free world under rule of law.
And we thought, we should make it quite clear to
communism that it could and WOULD never win, and that we were going to
fight the battle of ideas between what the free world had to offer,
compared with the dictatorship and tyranny and cruelty of communism.
At the British Embassy in Moscow,
Margaret Thatcher has a lunch date with
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader. It's still in good shape.
There's one thing in the Kremlin which is...
As with Ronald Reagan, she developed a particular rapport with
the Soviet leader and his wife, Raisa Gorbachev.
The assumption, it's called the assumption...
THEY ALL SPEAK OVER EACH OTHER
So this is... The other buildings are a bit smaller.
It was with Gorbachev that she fought the battle of ideas
and witnessed the end of the Cold War.
The break-up of the Soviet Union
came about while the transatlantic alliance was led by two
right-wingers, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Both now believe their common stance hastened
the end of the Cold War.
It was marvellous that we had President Reagan at the same
time as you in Moscow.
And President Reagan was a lovely man to deal with.
You both got on so well.
And I think that just helped to bring the Cold War to an end.
Margaret Thatcher first met Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1984 when,
as a rising communist official, he led a Soviet delegation to Britain.
It was the Foreign Office who spotted the potential of this
future leader, and advised the Prime Minister to invite
Mikhail Gorbachev down to Chequers.
And he arrived there, just before lunch, on a December day.
And from the very first moment, it was clear that here was
an exceptional man. You could tell.
I would say that he radiated power, like no-one I have ever seen.
He's, as you know, stocky in build. Very alert.
Eyes swivelling around the whole time, picking up people,
darting around, talking very rapidly.
Normally, when you talk to a Soviet politician,
he arrives with a pile of papers.
And you ask a question, and he looks through the papers
and finds the answer.
And the answer is not satisfactory, so you ask another question
and he looks through the papers and find another answer, which is
equally unsatisfactory. You don't get anywhere.
You don't get to grips with argument.
Within three months of the Chequers meeting,
the Russian President, Konstantin Chernenko, was dead.
With him passed the old order of the Soviet Union.
Chernenko was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev as the new general
secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
Gorbachev was determined to end the Brezhnev years of stagnation
and like Margaret Thatcher, to reopen East-West dialogue.
The British cultivation of the rising Soviet politician was
to pay large dividends.
After the funeral,
Margaret Thatcher made a point of reasserting her close
personal ties with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Our fundamental ideas were different, and they remain different.
Because he was trying to reform communism, to change it to
something very different, but it was basically a reform.
So, the method, the argument, the debate, the getting to grips
with the issues was the same, the fundamental beliefs were different.
But don't forget, I got on very well with Mr Gorbachev, and said, this
is a man I can do business with, and the world can do business with.
So did President Reagan. She laid the foundation for what took place.
We both had had the experience of previous Soviet leaders.
There were three in the first few years of my presidency.
And I couldn't get along with any of them.
And, but, this was an entirely, entirely different.
She had a profound influence on President Reagan
and particularly, in his approach to what
he had characterised in 1981 as the evil empire.
Five years later, if Margaret Thatcher,
his close colleague and philosophical
soul mate is saying, look, we can do business with this guy, that is
very persuasive, I think, to President Reagan.
In fact I know it was, because I was there.
In November 1986, the American President attended an
arms-control summit with the Soviet leader at Reykjavik in Iceland.
Ronald Reagan had by now become obsessed
with his dream of a nuclear-free world.
He was intent on developing his Star Wars defence
against missile attack, much to Gorbachev's alarm.
Margaret Thatcher shared
some of the Soviet leader's concerns about Star Wars
and did not believe in a future without nuclear weapons.
The idea that there could ever be such a thing as a nuclear-free world,
was a great difference of view between Ronald Reagan and myself.
I knew full well, that you could no more disinvent nuclear weapons
than you could disinvent dynamite.
During their discussions, Gorbachev proposed that both sides
should destroy their nuclear arsenals.
To the horror of his allies, Reagan came within an inch of giving up
the West's nuclear deterrent.
Only when the Soviet leader insisted that Reagan's beloved strategic
defence initiative, Star Wars, also be cut, did the President hold back.
When I heard about it,
I just felt as if there had been an earthquake underneath my feet.
If you've ever been in an earthquake, you know what it's like.
There's no place on the ground where you can put your feet,
where they're safe, because the whole thing is shaking.
And the whole thing was shaking, we hadn't a defence any more.
I thought, my goodness me, I must get over. Mrs Thatcher sallied forth.
At the first opportunity,
she travelled to Ronald Reagan's Camp David retreat.
Her purpose - to put the President straight on nuclear deterrence.
She also needed his assurance that America would supply Britain
with the Trident nuclear weapons system.
We had a session which ended up with a bit of paper in which the
Americans reaffirmed the doctrine of nuclear deterrence,
reaffirmed that they would supply us with Trident,
because of course, otherwise,
it would have been, apart from anything else,
quite politically damaging to
Mrs Thatcher, the idea, at a time when the Labour Party was
unilateralist of an American President arguing for getting rid of
nuclear weapons, when she had staked everything and her defence policy on
having Trident from the Americans, that was potentially very damaging.
Senior members of the Reagan administration often welcomed
Mrs Thatcher's influence over the President.
They shared her mistrust of his dream of a nuclear-free world.
Her influence was very constructive.
And so I was always glad to see her coming and as a matter of fact,
I sometimes,
when I was trying to persuade the President of something, that I knew
she agreed with that, and that he was reluctant about, I was shameless
in saying, now, Mr President,
here's what Margaret Thatcher says on that subject.
And, you know, that she has looked into it,
and so, you should hear me out on this.
But in the councils of Europe, there was none of the mutual
admiration that had grown up between Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher's
suspicion of the community
and her preference for all things American had come to alarm
her fellow heads of state and her Foreign Secretary.
As Mrs Thatcher turned to America, Sir Geoffrey Howe became more
cautious about the special relationship.
Every European country claims with some good reason or another,
a special relationship. Ours was special special,
because of the linguistic and historical ties,
and because of the enormous defence collaboration,
intelligence collaboration, so it was uniquely special.
But we should never give it an exclusive role.
Our relationship with Europe was as important
and increasingly important.
It was America that came to rescue Europe for freedom.
Although freedom and rule of law had started in Europe.
It was the New World coming to rescue the old.
And so, your policies weren't built on America or Europe,
they were built on the way of life of a free society and a free people.
And people who tried to separate the two had only shallow
understanding of what it was all about.
In her view, I have the feeling that the Channel still remains to be
much wider than the North Atlantic,
between London and Washington.
So, we continental Europeans had to take this as a fact of life,
which we couldn't change.
We did not expect Britain to leave the community,
and we did not expect Maggie Thatcher to govern
the country for 25 years, so we had to wait for better weather.
Shortly before the 1987 general election, Mikhail Gorbachev
asked Mrs Thatcher to visit Moscow, an invitation she eagerly accepted.
She was always happiest when cutting a figure on the international
scene, away from what she saw as the petty squabbles of domestic
politics and the infighting of the European Community.
The visit also had the advantage of being the perfect
springboard for her election campaign.
For some time, those close to the Prime Minister had felt that
her appearance was not quite suitable for a world leader.
The time had come for a change of image.
I had seen a very beautiful black coat in Aquascutum's window
in Regent Street.
And it had wonderful shoulders, you know, the really big shoulders.
And she has always looked very good in black.
So I said to her, "If you're going off to see Mrs Gorbachev,
"who I believe is dressed mostly in Yves Saint Laurent, I wonder if
"I could go and get this coat, this lovely black coat."
And she said, "By all means."
So I went up and got it and of course I brought it back
and she looked absolutely stunning in it.
She took with her the whole range of the Aquascutum latest models.
'And she wore these clothes magnificently.
'And the Russians adored the clothes and adored her for wearing them.
'And that was pure feminine guile.'
She was not unaware that this was very helpful at home,
especially if you've got an election coming up.
Mikhail Gorbachev had picked Margaret Thatcher
as the European leader most likely to influence the United States.
He hoped that she might help bridge the gulf between East and West.
For her part, Mrs Thatcher confronted
Mikhail Gorbachev with her views on the evils of communism.
'We had the practice of not having many advisers,
'and we got on best of all
'when I had just one secretary with me, he had one with him.
'He had his interpreter and I had mine. I had mine, an expert,
'so I knew that what I said would be interpreted accurately.
'I wasn't going to have any interpreter afraid to say
'to Mr Gorbachev what I was saying.'
And he would bully me, it seemed, and I would believe him back.
Then I'd say, "Now, come on, let's get down to the issues."
TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN:
There were moments where there were just four of us sitting there
round a small table,
and they were leaning across this table, their faces coming closer
and closer together, and speaking really very fiercely at each other.
Neither of them willing to yield. Then, suddenly, just like that,
Gorbachev would manage to break the tension.
He would sit back, relax, he would laugh,
he would make a joke or something.
And then they would get back to a calmer form of discussion.
And then they would again build up to a sort of crisis point.
The Prime Minister had made a special request to
Mr Gorbachev that she should visit a church
and witness freedom of worship at first-hand.
The Soviet leader agreed,
and Mrs Thatcher made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Zagorsk.
SIRENS BLARE
The visit to the Soviet Union was a coup for Margaret Thatcher.
The pictures of her in the by now famous outfits were
splashed across the British press.
As a prelude to an election campaign,
it was a politician's dream.
If you look back at the opinion polls and things,
you will find a sort of welling up of support for the government.
It dates from more or less the time of the Moscow visit,
and that helped create a momentum which helped - helped, I say -
win the 1987 election.
Early in May 1987, the Prime Minister
announced that she was going to the palace to seek a dissolution
of Parliament, and declared a general election on 11th June.
Although from the beginning the Conservative Party was ahead
in the polls, the election was not a happy one for Margaret Thatcher.
She dominated her party and became a leading figure on the world stage.
But behind the show of party unity,
there were mutterings about a possible successor.
The Prime Minister felt threatened by rivals, real or imaginary.
Geoffrey, can you just stand back a bit now?
Most importantly, her relationship with the party chairman
at Central Office, Norman Tebbit,
was going through a rare period of coolness.
Every Prime Minister, I guess like every medieval monarch,
is wondering who has their eyes on the crown.
Who has power centres which could set them up as a rival.
And I wanted to make changes at Central Office,
some of which would have made it more powerful.
She was ambivalent.
She wanted Central Office to be extraordinarily powerful -
a well-oiled machine - once she had called an election.
But I think she was always concerned that it was another barony.
She began to feel that there was a moment when Norman's interest
was as much in promoting his own career as in supporting her.
And I think if you start to feel like that,
that your party chairman sees himself as a successor,
then I think you have the seeds of misunderstanding and distrust.
I don't think I saw as much of Norman as I would had he been a minister.
I think that was probably one of the problems.
When he was a minister, we saw one another very often.
When he was chairman of the party,
he came as Chancellor of the Duchy to a cabinet meeting.
But I perhaps didn't work as closely together with him
as we did as ministerial colleagues.
That might have been a little bit of the problem.
Plus the fact that things were not going well at the beginning.
Lord Young joined Norman Tebbit running the election campaign.
The Prime Minister was concerned about Norman Tebbit's
handling of the party's bureaucracy.
David Young was her current favourite.
He was a businessman whom she had made a cabinet minister,
and he was ordered to keep an eye on Norman Tebbit at Central Office.
In the words of Nigel Lawson, the two generals spent as much
time fighting each other as they did fighting the enemy.
Very often, when I was talking to David, as I did, about my own
ideas as to what might be done and how we might handle things,
initiatives that might be taken, when those ideas were at a very
early stage, I thought we were merely discussing those privately.
I came to believe afterwards that he had been taking them to the
Prime Minister and expressing them as his own ideas.
I never needed to do that once.
No, that is nonsense.
I regret he even thinks that,
because that was certainly not the case in those days.
Indeed, it was the other way round.
The Conservative campaign got off to a slow start.
One at a time. What do you want us to do? No, which one? The big one.
Margaret Thatcher's election tour seemed designed
more as a photo opportunity than a chance to meet the people.
Indeed, it seemed a tacit admission by her party that she was
more popular with the Russians than she was
with the voters in her own country.
Particularly in later years,
she was greeted almost everywhere she went as a sort of hero figure.
Huge crowds would turn out. She got a very warm welcome.
Foreign leaders certainly had a great respect for her view.
This was in great contrast, in a way,
to how she was viewed in Britain.
I suppose it's the old saying, the old adage, of a prophet
being without honour in his own country.
At the end of the day, I think Mrs Thatcher was more admired,
more respected abroad, than she ever was at home.
David Young was in charge of Mrs Thatcher's bus tours.
Any other news?
The party chairman, Norman Tebbit, thought they were a shambles.
If I were to be running that campaign again,
I would've taken personal control of the Prime Minister's tours.
I think it was very clear that there was severe...friction,
that they were badly managed.
There was one extraordinary occasion when
she arrived for a series of great industrial meetings at a town
where the factories were closed for the holidays, for example.
'I'm not going to go back into that sort of thing.
'If Norman wants to say that, he can.'
This is the crucial thing about an election campaign.
He had lost her confidence.
And in an election campaign,
having the confidence of the Prime Minister is incredibly important.
Labour have got off to a very glitzy start,
we'd had those incredible commercials for party
political broadcasts that showed Kinnock in a very rosy light.
And we were getting a tremendous number of phone calls
the whole time, and she was being told round the country that we were
looking a bit amateurish.
The Prime Minister got the message.
She wanted to meet the people but was taken instead to a dogs' home.
As she herself said, "Dogs don't have votes."
Mrs Thatcher was worried that Norman Tebbit was deliberately
keeping her out of the limelight.
Before the campaign, he brought her research which implied
that she was unpopular with the voters.
They called it the TBW - "That Bloody Woman Syndrome".
I had been asked, did I know what TBW meant?
Well, in electoral terms, I didn't, and indeed, in government,
you have so many letters that another lot, you think, "Whatever is that?"
And then they told me it means "That B Woman".
And so for that reason they felt it was better to keep me off television.
I did venture to say that I had won two elections.
Things came to a head on Thursday 4th June,
a day to be immortalised as "Wobbly Thursday".
The Prime Minister was suffering from toothache and she was
too busy answering questions about private health to have it treated.
I had that question on the phone-in yesterday.
I'm sorry you didn't listen to the answer. Can't be everywhere.
No, can't be everywhere, no, but you can listen.
LAUGHTER
To make matters worse, only a week before election day, a poll
had been published which slashed the Conservatives' lead over Labour.
At an early morning meeting at the Conservative Party's
Central Office, Margaret Thatcher responded furiously.
Her demeanour at that meeting was unreasoning and unreasonable
and close to hysteria.
Where it was impossible to put a point or even to be listened to.
And it was quite clear that there was no point in saying anything.
That same Thursday, the Prime Minister had to go through
with a planned visit to a factory making diggers
and a theme park, all the while anxious about the opinion polls.
SCREAMING
'It was supposed to be the fun day out where we would
'go on the rides and get good pictures for the press.
'We had actually been looking forward to it,
'but the atmosphere was terrible in that we were all
'waiting to see what this poll would bring in the evening.'
The Prime Minister was very apprehensive.
She was not her usual relaxed self.
That was reflected throughout the whole of the team accompanying her.
And we would be constantly on the telephone to Central Office
and there was just a mood of jitters.
You can imagine how terrible I felt.
And I heard one of the television commentators say,
"That's it, she's downhill all the way."
But one smiled one's way round and went round and saw everything
and then got back to London.
Now, at no time did they tell me that that had been a rogue poll.
It was absolutely out of keeping with all of the others,
and I needn't worry about it. They just didn't tell me that.
So I was worried, and naturally,
I had to see that we then got our message across and then
we swung from what we were going to do in the future to pointing out
what we had done in the past.
In the light of the poor poll, Margaret Thatcher ordered
that Norman Tebbit's advertising campaign should be dumped.
In its place, Lord Young produced a series of posters stressing
the past achievements of Margaret Thatcher's government.
Lord Young showed the new advertisements to Norman Tebbit.
And he looked at them and he exploded and he said, "You can't have that."
And that's when I lost my cool, and I got hold of Norman
and I did shake him, and I said, "Norman, if you don't do this,
"we're going to blankety blank lose this election," I said.
"And it won't matter what you think or I think.
"Now, if this what she wants, this is what she's going to get."
It was rather more fraught language.
I leave people to judge whether it's likely I would have been seized
by the lapels, without some retribution
falling upon he that did it.
So... But certainly I can say that, at that moment,
David Young was convinced that we had lost the election.
He changed his mind when he got home
and saw the next day's opinion polls.
In the event, the poll which prompted
Wobbly Thursday proved to be wholly inaccurate.
The Conservative Party
could go to the polls, one week later, confident of victory.
On June 11, 1987, Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party
won a third term, with a majority of 101.
The upswing in the economy, together with the opposition split
between Labour and the Alliance, ensured victory.
We have a lot of work to do tomorrow.
For Margaret Thatcher, the 1987 election victory
was a personal, as well as a political, triumph.
She was the first Prime Minister this century
to win three successive election victories.
She may not have had great personal appeal, but many of her policies -
in particular, privatisation, the spread of home ownership
and lower direct taxes - were popular in the country
and were being copied abroad.
A hat-trick was quite something in politics.
Quite something. Quite rare.
But you know, it was because the British people didn't think much
of our opponents. They didn't like those policies.
Those policies weren't right for the character of Britain
and ours were. And Britain was riding high.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
But behind the jubilation, the campaign left a sour taste.
Norman Tebbit told her, shortly before the poll,
that he would not rejoin her Cabinet.
'I think it's fair'
to say, as always, that, if having been close to a great leader
and having been very loyal to that great leader,
one finds that other advice is preferred,
one can feel a little hurt. Whether that hurt is justified or not
is not for me to say. That is for others to judge.
I think there are some people who are rather more sensitive than others.
What I had to bear in mind was it was my job to see that we won
that election so our policies continued.
We had, therefore, to get things right.
And if that meant, I'm afraid, one or two sensitivities,
then, well, we just had to ignore them.
Elections are not about sensitivities,
they are about victory, because you believe in what you are doing.
That was the objective and that was what I had to do in that last week -
to see that we were able to continue as government.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
But many within the party had become concerned
at the internal rivalries and disputes during the campaign.
Some thought that the Prime Minister's manner,
especially on Wobbly Thursday, was a sign that she'd served long enough.
I was present at one of those meetings at Wobble Thursday,
one of the early meetings...
..when her performance was such that, one of the handful of people
in that meeting - a very senior Cabinet minister -
left that meeting and said to me,
"There is a woman who will never fight another election again."
Pessimists warned that
any Prime Minister winning a third election victory
was in danger of the sin of hubris - pride before a fall -
but Margaret Thatcher had no intention of standing down.
'There was no question of hubris. Victory's a marvellous emollient.
'It soothes everyone's sensitivities. Whatever had happened, we'd all won.'
Oh, no. My life was a daily battle.
And I never gave up.
The 1987 Conservative election victory coincided with
one of Britain's most long-lasting booms.
For a period, it looked as though Britain's economic problems
had been cured.
# I've got the brains You've got the looks
# Let's make lots of money. #
At the core of so-called Thatcherism was the policy of privatisation -
the sale of state-owned assets to the public - but as consumption
increased, so did poverty. The number of destitute
and homeless on the city streets grew.
Crime increased. It became a commonplace over the Thatcher years
that the rich got richer, while the poor became poorer.
For those in work, the times were good.
Thanks to the financial deregulation, credit was easy.
Companies and individuals
borrowed more than ever before.
House prices and personal debt rocketed.
'There was an enormous feeling of optimism in the country
'and in the economy, among consumers and among businessmen, of a kind
'that had not been known'
in this country
for a very, very long time.
There was an excessive optimism,
excessive expectations about
what was possible. It was an arrow, if you like, in the right direction,
because optimism is more desirable than gloom and defeatism,
but, nevertheless, it went too far.
Since 1983, Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor, Nigel Lawson,
had pursued Thatcherite policies with vigour.
He cut, and simplified, taxes. He deregulated. He privatised.
But his relationship with the Prime Minister was never an easy one
and their quarrels were to split Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet in two.
'Nigel was secretive.'
I think he was a man of many complexes.
He was also a man of many, many talents.
Sometimes a very creative person will have also great drawbacks.
But he did some very imaginative Budgets in income tax, you know.
He wrote the best Budgets, as far as style was concerned,
that we have ever had.
And I always took the view
that you've got to take the rough with the smooth.
If you've got great talent and ability,
then you've got to take some of the drawbacks with it.
The results of Nigel Lawson's first Budget seemed,
at the time, unprecedented. Indeed, the Prime Minister
was confident that Britain's economic problems had been cured,
so much so that, soon after the election,
she ventured into the northern industrial wastelands and promised
to reclaim them for the Conservatives.
But beneath the show of confidence, an argument over economic policy
was undermining her government.
For two years, the Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, had pressed
for Britain's membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism,
the ERM, to control inflation.
At a crucial meeting with senior colleagues, in November 1985,
Lawson had urged Margaret Thatcher that the time was right
for Britain to join the ERM.
Almost all, bar the Prime Minister, had agreed.
Well, I think, in a way, we all surprised each other by the extent
to which there was near unanimity in support of that view.
And I was perhaps not surprised, but dismayed, by the extent to which
the Prime Minister was reluctant to accept that, because it seemed to me
that we were reaching a sensible, constructive, vital decision.
Sadly, of course, because we failed to take that opportunity then,
we found it increasingly hard to maintain proper management
of our own counter-inflationary policy.
Margaret Thatcher, after putting up objection after objection,
one after the other,
to it eventually said that... concluded by saying,
"Well, if you join the ERM, you do it without me."
And there was a deathly silence... and then she left the room.
Well, I knew that they were ganging up on me
and I knew that my own reasoning was right and I was backed up
by my own adviser. He wasn't there, but he put in a paper.
And so, I felt strong enough to say no.
Thank goodness I did!
We really should have been in the soup, had I agreed with them
and put it into action.
I went back into Number 11
and Willie Whitelaw and Norman Tebbit came with me -
I asked them to - and I asked them whether they felt really that,
in those circumstances, I should resign.
And they persuaded me not to and said they were sure that,
eventually, she would come round to it.
Ironically, of course, eventually, she did, although that was
some years later, five years later, after I had gone and when the time
was no longer right.
The Prime Minister was stiffened in her opposition
to the Exchange Rate Mechanism
by her economic adviser, Professor Alan Walters,
an academic teaching in the United States.
Walters counselled her to resist Nigel Lawson, at all costs.
If you want to bring inflation down, you've got to reduce...
'I don't think he ever met the arguments which I put against it.
'"Sloppy Lawson." He sails over those.'
I think what happened
was, on this issue,
it became a, sort of, personal battle
between him and the Prime Minister.
And it was, like so many things in politics,
a matter of power - a power struggle.
And it had Shakespearean tones!
Margaret Thatcher's disagreement over how to run the economy, had,
in the words of Nigel Lawson, "sown the seeds of a fatal rift
"between the Prime Minister and her most senior Cabinet colleagues."
Without agreement on policy, the economy began to overheat.
Margaret Thatcher's colleagues saw her preference for the opinions
of advisers like Alan Walters
as evidence of a growing presidential style
and her further retreat into Downing Street.
'I think that, all people in authority - '
and the greater the authority, the greater the risk -
can create for themselves a cocoon which isolates them from
other influences in the rest of the world.
It's the greatest danger of leadership.
I think that it does manifest itself by tenaciously retaining
a small, increasingly long-serving, band of supporters.
Sir Geoffrey Howe was increasingly concerned
about the influence of Charles Powell,
the Prime Minister's private secretary.
During their trip to Russia, it was Powell, not the Foreign Secretary,
who was ever at her side,
and it was Powell who went with the Prime Minister to the meetings
with Gorbachev.
As Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher grew apart on Europe,
Powell's influence grew stronger.
'He became too closely personally associated'
with the Prime Minister's positions
and this exacerbated what is always a delicate relationship,
between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office
and the Foreign Secretary. And...I think that it's another case
where he was in that job for too long.
The Prime Minister, who didn't read the newspapers,
relied on Bernard Ingham, her press secretary,
for a digest of the news.
Many ministers felt that Ingham had an unhealthy relationship
with the tabloid press.
I'm sure that's all bumkum. I bet it's balderdash, too.
Hmm? That all right?
'Bernard Ingham would try, and often succeed,'
in influencing the line that The Sun took.
And then he would then report that line and say,
"Look, this is the view of the press,
"this is the view of the people."
In fact, it was the view that he had given The Sun in the first place.
And, to some extent, he could do that, although less so with
the other tabloids. And I think that it did give Margaret Thatcher
a distorted picture of what was being said and, indeed,
very often, what her colleagues were saying.
Grow up, is my attitude to that. It is fantasy.
I just wonder how a Chancellor of the Exchequer
can go through life as a member of the Cabinet and as a minister
and hold that view. It's time he grew up.
It's the most ludicrous fantasy.
You try telling The Sun to print anything...
..and you'll look at the results of your trying to tell them to do so.
It's... It's...
He ought to have learned that by now.
Ministers resented the power the Prime Minister invested in Ingham,
with his off-the-record briefings peppered with unflattering comments
about their performance.
Right, morning, all.
The Prime Minister is working in Number Ten for much of the day
and, at ten o'clock, she...
NIGEL LAWSON: 'The impression, clearly,
'was that he was HER press secretary
'and not the government's or even the Cabinet's.
'And one of the ways in which he would exalt her was by
'rubbishing a number of her colleagues.'
That seemed to me to be bad for the government and, indeed,
bad for relations between her and those colleagues.
But that was something which he did on a number of occasions.
You look at what I had to take, day after day.
You look at the things about the attitude of Nigel Lawson
and Geoffrey Howe, which found their way into the press, day after day,
about the Exchange Rate Mechanism, about shadowing the Deutsche Mark.
Oh, go and look at those.
I never squealed....never.
Bernard had a lot to put up with
and I will not take any criticism of Bernard.
I could wish that every one of my ministers had done their job
to the same percentage of excellence as Bernard did his.
No single government measure in Margaret Thatcher's time in office
caused so much anger and political difficulty as the poll tax.
It led to rioting in the streets
but, more importantly for the Prime Minister,
the Community Charge never won the backing of her own supporters.
To this day, she insists that the principal of the tax,
a flat fee payable by everybody for local services, was the right one.
I think on Community Charge, if the Cabinet had kept their nerve,
we would have got it right.
Of course, it takes some time and application of fundamental principle
to see that everyone has a fair deal.
We were well on the way to getting that
and if they had kept their nerve it would have been all right.
It broke all the sort of laws
which Margaret herself not only believed in
but was normally better than anybody else at policing.
It made people, in a random way,
and some of those who could least afford it, worse off.
All the, sort of, middle-class strivers and savers
were clobbered by the poll tax in that random way.
What is more, it offended every political law
because it actually TARGETED...
targeted floating voters in marginal constituencies.
Throughout her previous two terms in office,
the Prime Minster had been at war with local government.
She regarded councils, especially Labour ones, as overspending,
wasteful and unaccountable...
..and she believed the rates, payable only by householders,
and businesses, to be fundamentally unfair.
Why should people say, "I can vote for this, more of this expenditure.
"Ha-ha, I won't pay a thing and you will have to pay pretty willingly,
"the whole increase." That was and is wrong.
So we were right, in principle, but we didn't have time to get it right.
When she was asked about the poll tax,
when she was asked critically about the poll tax,
she would always defend it in theory.
Now, you can make a theoretical case for it.
It's not, to my mind, never was, never will be a theoretical case
but you can make a theoretical case.
What is quite clear is that in practice would be a disaster.
At the party conference, in 1987,
the Prime Minister hailed the introduction of the new tax.
And above all, the Community Charge will make local councils far more
accountable to all their voters.
But despite the show of unity, colleagues were not all behind her.
In a secret memo, Nigel Lawson warned the Cabinet that the poll tax
would be completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.
He predicted that local authorities would increase expenditure
in the run-up to the introduction.
The Prime Minister ignored him.
Sure enough, when councils sent out the poll tax bills
they were much higher than anticipated.
Nigel Lawson refused to subsidise a tax he opposed.
The Chancellor actually had the answer,
to the fact that the Community Charge was too high, available,
if he thought he could use it.
We could have dealt with that by increasing
the grant from the Exchequer to the local authorities.
Nigel said he could not do that
because he did not want to put up public expenditure
but that was the way in which it was eventually dealt with.
So the answer to Nigel was within his own possibility to find.
Hi. Morning, sir. Hello...
In 1989 Mrs Thatcher appointed Chris Patten, an avowed moderate,
as Environment Secretary.
Mr Patten, why do you think you've been given the job? Erm...
..your picture taken in front of the sign that says "DOE"? Sure, sure.
His task, to sell the tax more effectively.
Sorry to be unceremonious.
Almost immediately Patten tried to persuade the Prime Minister
that, in his words, the alleged flagship in the Spithead Review
was actually a fire ship which was going to destroy the whole fleet.
I went to see her,
there were two private secretaries present and I said to her, "I do not
"believe that it is possible to sell the poll tax in these circumstances.
"I just don't think we're doing enough."
It was the only meeting that I ever had with her
where I didn't subsequently receive a note or a record of the meeting.
I'm not aware that he ever said precisely that
because he was a vigorous defender of it
at the despatch box, in the House of Commons,
and made some of the best speeches, and converted many people.
I think it was regarded as being politically tricky
to have a Cabinet minister on record saying,
"If you'd prefer me to go, I will.
"I've tried, I haven't got enough money,
"I don't think this is going to do the trick.
"I'll battle on, if you want me to,
"but I don't think we're going to be able to sell this."
THEY CHANT
The Community Charge was fast becoming a political calamity.
It was widely seen as unfair that a duke should pay
the same as a pensioner.
For the first time in living memory, Conservative supporters in Surrey
took to the streets against a Tory government.
The Conservative Party lost by-elections in two safe seats
where the poll tax was an issue.
At Westminster the charge became a focus of Conservative dissent.
Increasingly, alarmed Tory backbenchers
threatened the government.
Many conservatives who were very anxious for her success
nonetheless felt that this was a most disastrous piece of legislation
and she would insist on identifying herself with it,
and in a most perverse way.
Like calling it the "flagship" of the legislation. While...
..I was irreverent enough to refer to it as the Titanic and I think,
on the whole, my nautical judgment was rather better than hers.
But Margaret Thatcher was not for turning.
Increasing numbers of Conservative backbenchers appealed to the Prime Minister in person
to reconsider and to abolish the Community Charge.
I went to see Mrs Thatcher and that was where the gate clamped shut,
in my mind, as one of her most fervent supporters.
And although I explained to her,
cos by that time the poll tax had started to bite,
how this was hitting young couples in my constituency...
with small children, with the husband just over the limit where they got a rebate,
perhaps only earning £5,000 a year.
How COULD that couple find a poll tax bill between them of about £900?
It was a tragedy.
I think myself, had Mrs Thatcher understood and been willing
to do something about it, that the poll tax would have been withdrawn
and Mrs Thatcher would still be Conservative party leader now.
For the first time in its history, steel gates were erected
outside Downing Street to protect against terrorist attack...
but the gates seem to emphasise the Prime Minister's growing isolation.
Behind them she felt increasingly alienated from her colleagues.
By that time, Margaret Thatcher had already retreated very much into her bunker.
She began to mistrust colleagues, for one reason or another.
It meant that she was actually removing herself,
not merely from her Cabinet, which is dangerous enough,
and allowing a gulf of some kind or other to emerge
but also from the party and from the...
to some extent, getting out of touch with the country, as a whole.
It may be that I was getting a little bit irritated that so many of my...
real initial, kind of, six strong men and true
that I always knew that I had to have were getting fewer and fewer.
Therefore I was having to bear a much bigger burden
of seeing that the ship went forward
in the direction in which we had always wanted it to go.
So, maybe I was getting a little bit testy because it was putting,
really, much more and more on me
to fulfil the purpose for which we were elected.
Margaret Thatcher was beset by problems.
The Community Charge, however much she backed it, was a political disaster.
The economy was seriously overheating,
the bitter argument about controlling inflation simmered on,
and, most gravely, a damaging split was opening with her senior colleagues over Europe.
As time passed, many of her colleagues began to think the unthinkable,
that she'd stayed in office long enough
and that the time had come to find a successor.
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