‘The cruellest thing’: the downfall of Margaret Thatcher

It's the most famous, the most dramatic, and arguably the most consequential Conservative leadership election of all time.

This is the latest in a series of posts on Conservative leadership elections. You can also read about:

• The first ever Tory leadership election in 1965 here.

• The 1975 battle for the Tory crown, which elevated Margaret Thatcher to the leadership, here.

• The first contest in 14 years, Sir Anthony Meyer’s ‘stalking horse’ challenge to Thatcher, here.

Image: Margaret Thatcher inspecting troops in Bermuda. Source: The Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

‘The cruellest thing’: the downfall of Margaret Thatcher

by Lee David Evans

In Autumn 1990, the prospect of the next general election was on the mind of many Tory MPs. If the Parliament ran for four years, as Margaret Thatcher’s previous terms as prime minister had, then voters would be going to the polls in little over six months. Yet the Conservatives’ opinion polling was dire, there had been riots over the poll tax, and Thatcher’s ministers, as well as many backbenchers, were increasingly unhappy with the direction of the government. Having declined to remove her in 1989, when Sir Anthony Meyer challenged Thatcher as a ‘stalking horse’, some MPs began to wonder whether they should seize the next opportunity for change at the top.

Wielding the knife

The annual window to strike against an incumbent Conservative leader came in the weeks following the Queen’s Speech, which in 1990 would be delivered on 7th November. Under Tory rules any contest would have to take place within 28 days. Thatcher and Cranley Onslow, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, agreed that the leadership election should take place as soon as possible. Nominations would be required by 15th November and should there be a challenge, the first ballot would take place five days later. For a while it seemed as if their discussion was academic. Former Cabinet minister Michael Heseltine, widely seen as the king-across-the-water and the favoured candidate of her staunchest critics, did not plan to challenge in 1990. 

One man’s actions would change Heseltine’s mind. Geoffrey Howe had been in Thatcher’s Cabinet since 1979, serving in two of the great offices of state - Chancellor and Foreign Secretary - before being given the title of deputy prime minister. If at first it seems that his latest role was a promotion, it wasn’t. Thatcher had wanted to relegate Howe from Foreign Secretary to Leader of the Commons; when he threatened to resign, the bauble of the deputy premiership was offered to assuage him. But a year on, their souring relationship was even worse. In Thatcher’s own words the pair ‘found each other’s company almost intolerable.’

Worse than their personal relationship was their diverging views on what was emerging as the great fissure in Tory politics: Europe. Long forgotten were the days when Thatcher donned a jumper with the flags of Europe on it and campaigned for Britain's place at the heart of the European Community. Instead, as European integration accelerated, the once enthusiastic Thatcher (who as recently as 1986 had played a key role in delivering the Single European Act) was becoming sceptical. Her Cabinet was mostly committed Europeans and managed to keep the official government position aligned with their own. Among them, Thatcher was a minority and was often having to say things she did not really believe for the sake of Cabinet unity.

Thatcher stopped toeing of her own government’s line after European leaders met in Rome to discuss progress on the future of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). She returned to London and, after reading out the prepared statement on the conference (which followed the agreed position) she felt unleashed and spoke for herself. Most famously, she told MPs:

The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No! No! No!

Howe, sat at her side, fumed. He began to conclude that his presence in the government, even as deputy prime minister, was ‘no longer restraining her dangerous anti-Europeanism.’ Despondent, on 1st November he saw Thatcher and tendered his resignation. Could anything make him stay, she asked. He said no, and she didn’t try to change his mind. ‘In a sense it was a relief,’ she later wrote. The last man standing from her original Cabinet was gone.

Howe’s departure energised rumours of a leadership challenge. At first people wondered if Howe would stand himself, but he readily accepted that others were better placed to challenge her. Attention soon focused on Heseltine. His de facto campaign manager, Michael Mates, reported that 143 MPs were lined up to back him. Whilst that might be enough to bring down Thatcher, it wasn’t enough to guarantee he would replace her - and Heseltine knew it. He feared even the support of so many MPs might consign him to the role of stalking horse and wanted, if at all possible, someone else to wield the knife before he entered on the second ballot.

Did Thatcher consider Howe’s departure a threat to her leadership? It doesn’t seem so. On 12th November she addressed the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and deployed a cricketing metaphor to demonstrate how she planned to continue to dominate her party into the future: 

I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking the bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground! That’s my style!

The following day, everything changed. Almost a fortnight after he resigned Howe exercised his right to make a resignation statement in the Commons. He took his place on the backbenches with Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s former Chancellor who had resigned a year earlier, by his side. When he spoke his style was understated, as it always was, but nobody doubted the substance. Howe borrowed Thatcher’s own cricketing metaphor (something much more in his lexicon than hers) and slammed her approach to Europe as:

… rather like sending our opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find that before the first ball is bowled, their bats have been broken by the team captain.

And concluded with a call to arms to his colleagues: 

The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long. 

Howe was clearly pleased with the impact of his remarks; half a decade later he named his memoirs, ‘Conflict of Loyalties.’ Thatcher, sitting on the Treasury bench, kept a stony expression. ‘The skill of Howe’s speech,’ Charles Moore, Thatcher’s official biographer, later wrote, ‘lay in the sense it gave of a question long meditated, of revealing previously hidden truths and of a big argument about national destiny threatened by the character of the person in charge.’ 

It is not obvious that Howe intended, or expected, his speech to bring down Thatcher. His aide Anthony Teasdale has said that he hoped to ‘get the Cabinet to rein in Mrs Thatcher’ on Europe. But Howe had let off a bomb the consequences of which he could not control. Heseltine immediately realised that for him not to stand now would be to have chickened out of the fight - probably for good. (There had been no conspiracy between Howe and Heseltine and the young pretender did not know of Howe’s resignation in advance. However, this didn’t stop the rumours: many MPs suspected they were in cahoots and their common Welsh ancestry led to the pair being dubbed the ‘Taffia’.) At 10:30am the next morning, Heseltine stood outside of his grand Belgravia home and, claiming the support of more than 100 MPs, announced his candidacy for leader of the Conservative Party.