Sir Stalking Horse takes on the Iron Lady

By 1989, some Conservative MPs had begun to doubt whether Margaret Thatcher was the right person to lead them into the next election. The question was: who, if anyone, would emerge to challenge her?

This is the latest in a series of posts on Conservative leadership elections. You can read about the first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here and the 1975 battle for the Tory crown, which elevated Margaret Thatcher to the leadership, here.

To my knowledge, Margaret Thatcher never had a photograph with Sir Anthony Meyer. So I asked AI to produce an image of her with a ‘stalking horse.’ This is the least ridiculous image it generated.

Sir Stalking Horse takes on the Iron Lady

by Lee David Evans

1989 was the year in which Margaret Thatcher celebrated a decade in Number 10. It made her the longest continuously serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool more than 150 years earlier. Yet this remarkable personal and political milestone did not put Britain’s ‘iron lady’ in mind of retirement; Thatcher still intended, as she once told the BBC, to go ‘on and on’. To do so, she would need to maintain the support of her colleagues in Parliament - and there were signs they had begun to turn against her.

Thatcher’s difficult year

Two problems cast a cloud over Thatcher’s decadal year. The first was policy, specifically the Community Charge or ‘poll tax’. The Act of Parliament giving effect to the new regime for funding local government had come in a year earlier, but many of the details about its introduction were still being worked out. As Charles Moore has written, the policy was the product of ‘a near consensus among Conservatives that the [old] ratings system was irreparable’ and the new tax itself had arisen through ‘Cabinet government, properly conducted.’ But no matter how strong the need for change, or how legitimate the process of crafting the alternative, the outcome - which would see 18 million people issued with bills for local government services for the first time - caused outrage among the public and panic among MPs. When Thatcher met representatives of the 1922 Committee to discuss the issue, she reported, ‘I have never seen the 1922 Executive in such a state.’

Thatcher’s other great problem was personnel, particularly two Chancellors. Geoffrey Howe, the then Foreign Secretary who as Chancellor had implemented the Thatcher economic agenda in the first term of her government, was told in July 1989 that he would be demoted. Thatcher offered him the positions of Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council. He refused, returned to his office (where he was found in tears) and drafted a letter of resignation. Keen to keep one of only three Cabinet ministers from her original ministry who still served around the top table, Thatcher subsequently offered him the role of Home Secretary, which he declined, and the title of Deputy Prime Minister, which he accepted. Howe stayed in government, but fumed at his treatment by the prime minister.

A few months later Nigel Lawson, the incumbent Chancellor, met with Thatcher to air a grievance. He was unhappy that one of Thatcher’s advisors, Sir Alan Walters, exercised significant influence over her economic thinking. Lawson insisted Walters was sacked; when Thatcher refused, he threatened to resign. Recognising the risk involved in losing a Chancellor, Thatcher dangled the prospect of becoming Governor of the Bank of England in front of Lawson. But his mind was clearly made up, and he resigned. (Walters followed shortly afterwards). Thatcher had to undertake a hasty reshuffle, just a few months after her last one, and promoted John Major, who had spent just three months as Foreign Secretary, to the Chancellorship.

Sir Stalking Horse

The grumbling axis of Howe and Lawson were not alone in their discontent with Thatcher’s leadership and throughout the summer speculation grew of a leadership challenge. Incumbent Tory leaders could be challenged once per year in the weeks following the beginning of the new Parliamentary session. (My previous post features an explanation and rationale for this rule. You can read it here.) Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Mark Lennox-Boyd, met Cranley Onslow, the Chairman of the all-important 1922 Committee, shortly before the summer recess. Onslow told him that Thatcher’s team should ‘at least consider the remote possibility that someone might seek to challenge the leader at the next election.’ The pair discussed who the possible candidates might be and agreed that it could be someone like Sir Anthony Meyer.

Meyer was a former soldier and diplomat who inherited a baronetcy from his father. Many saw him as an old school Tory, in the sense that his views predated those which grew to dominate the party under Thatcher’s leadership. Although he claimed to admire the prime minister, he was increasingly frustrated with the way she ran her government. On one issue, in particular, he was left furious by Thatcher’s approach: Europe. Meyer believed that Britain should embrace ‘ever closer union’ with the continent and the more Thatcher became sceptical of Brussels, the more determined he was to see her gone. Meyer had previously called for Thatcher to resign in 1986 and, when Lawson resigned, he reissued his demand. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association sensed a scoop and called Meyer in his office:

'I see you are calling for the Prime Minister to be opposed at the annual election this year. Who should it be to oppose her?'

'I really don't know. You can think of three or four people who would do it admirably.'

'Yes, but if none of them will, would you?'

‘Don't be absurd. It has got to be a serious candidate.'

'But if none of them are prepared to do it, would you?' 

‘Well, I suppose that if absolutely nobody better can be found someone will have to offer themselves up as a burnt offering, and it might then have to be me.'

In a sign of how ill-suited Meyer was to top flight politics, in less than sixty seconds a journalist had bounced him into standing against the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Knowing his limitations as a politician, he desperately wished for someone else to stand who stood a better chance. About those in the Cabinet, whom he knew to be discontented but would not take a stand, he wrote, ‘It is none too easy to have respect for the members of a Cabinet who are so eager to lie down and be walked over.’ But with nobody else willing to put their head above the parapet, he became a ‘stalking horse.’