of her reservations, since she didn’t tell me about them.
Neither did I know that she had asked Charles Powell to draft a second statement, making plain our views as distinct from our reservations about the majority view. I was content with that. Charles set to in robust fashion. The heads of government had retired to the island retreat of Langkawi – reports came back that Margaret spent her lunchtime feeding Benazir Bhutto’s fifteen-month-old baby, while Denis complained of the cold (the temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) and repaired to the bar for comfort.
When we saw Charles’s text, Stephen Wall added some preliminary sentences to stress areas in which the communiqué made progress, and on that basis I was content for it to go forward. I was unaware of the dispute that had taken place on Langkawi over the foreign ministers’ draft, or that, in the words of Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada, our Commonwealth partners had ‘watered their wine’ to accommodate Margaret Thatcher. Nor, in my innocence, did I realise the extent to which the issuing of a separate statement breached normal procedure. Even if I had, I would have seen no reason why we should not express our own view. I did, though, see the risk that the second statement would be seen as a rift between myself and the Prime Minister, and for that reason asked for it to be issued as a joint statement.
The statement provoked two huge rows. The first, soon disposed of, was in the Heads of Government Meeting. ‘How could Mrs Thatcher sign an agreement at 5 p.m. and repudiate it at 6 p.m.?’ was the charge. Our view was that we stood by the agreement, but had added to it the reasons for our open and stated dissent to part of it. In fact, this irritable but perfectly straightforward squabble between heads of government suited everyone, because it enabled all concerned to peddle their views to their own domestic audiences. They all saw the advantage of that, and did so with gusto.
The second row had wider domestic impact. I had briefed the British press in very upbeat fashion about the communiqué I had agreed. They were grumpy and disgruntled that a novice foreign secretary had robbed them of a spectacular row at a boring conference. Unfortunately Bernard Ingham’s initial briefing of the press was done in a rush – like the rest of us, he was catching up with the new draft – and delivered with characteristic Inghamesque brutality. It involved him more or less reading out a confidential letter from Charles reporting on the discussion on Langkawi, and recording the Prime Minister saying she did not much like the foreign ministers’ text.
This was taken as a criticism of me, and was manna from heaven for the press. Ever eager for drama, they presented it as Mrs Thatcher disowning my negotiations, slapping me down and embarrassing me. The new boy on the block was being put in his place. There was some flavour of this in questions put to me at my press conference, but since I knew the Prime Minister did not intend to undermine me I did not allow it to worry me.
As I flew home, a day earlier than Mrs Thatcher since I had questions to answer in the Commons, I reflected on my first three months as foreign secretary. I was tired but reasonably satisfied. I thought I had made some solid gains. I was now infinitely better informed on foreign policy. I was comfortable and confident with bilaterals, and prepared to take on all comers. I had re-established relations with China after Tiananmen Square and was moving towards doing so with Argentina. I had staked out a pragmatic position on Europe and was getting the measure of how the EEC worked. I had weathered difficult confrontations at the Commonwealth Conference and felt the substance had gone well.
When I arrived at the Spelthorne Suite at Heathrow, however, I realised I was being complacent. The press were playing up the supposed row at CHOGM for all it was worth and more; the damage being done was evident. I licked my wounds and prepared to be more careful the next time Margaret and I travelled abroad together.
But there was to be no next time. After ninety-four days my brief tenure as foreign secretary would come to an end.
CHAPTER SEVEN An Ambition Fulfilled
ON 26 OCTOBER 1989, after the Prime Minister had delivered her Commons statement on the Kuala Lumpur conference, she turned to me on the front bench and invited me to join her for tea in her room behind the Speaker’s Chair. I assumed she wanted to make peace after the fuss over the foreign ministers’ communiqué. Though she never apologised, she could be extraordinarily friendly to colleagues to whom she had caused trouble, sometimes treating them to an informal chat about politics in the stream-of-consciousness way she so enjoyed when she was relaxing. This, however, was to be no such cosy occasion. She had a bombshell to drop.
We had no sooner settled on the sofas in her room than she said without preamble: ‘Nigel is going to resign and I might want you as chancellor.’
This was startling news, with political implications which shocked me even as the drama stirred my blood. ‘When?’ I asked.
‘Today,’ she said.
So far so clear, but the question in my mind was ‘Why?’ The strains between the Prime Minister and her chancellor were well enough known. Equally, however, I had noted in Cabinet how she generally supported Nigel, and sometimes even deferred to him – behaviour so out of character that it was, perhaps, an attempt at peacemaking, though I had not viewed it as such. She certainly never treated him in the cavalier, intolerant and often discourteous style she displayed towards Geoffrey Howe – whose forbearance, in its own way, was as remarkable as her rudeness. In the Commons, where not long before she had described Nigel Lawson’s position as ‘unassailable’, he was accepted as just that, a great figure in the party, one of the long marchers, a fully-paid-up member of the Radical Tendency, and the Chancellor who, a mere eighteen months earlier, had been practically walking on water. Almost nobody, therefore, believed he really would resign – the Prime Minister and myself included.
I learned later that Nigel had demanded that the Prime Minister sack Sir Alan Walters, her old mentor who had returned in May for a second term as her economic adviser. I had never met Walters, but I did know that he had long been undermining the Chancellor in private. His contempt for Nigel was undisguised, and was a common topic of conversation in both the City and Fleet Street. Now he had broken cover with an article in the Financial Times ridiculing as ‘half-baked’ a line of policy Nigel was known to favour and the Prime Minister to oppose, namely joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), which would keep the value of sterling within pre-agreed limits against other European currencies. It is true that the piece had originally appeared in an American journal eighteen months before, but this second airing was accompanied by a note making it clear that Walters had in no way changed his view.
This situation would have been impossible for any chancellor, and Nigel was taunted on account of it both in Parliament and outside. Who was the real chancellor, Lawson or Walters? Who had the Prime Minister’s ear, Lawson or Walters? With whom did she agree? Sadly, the answer to that last question was evident. She agreed with Walters, and for a proud man like Nigel this was intolerable. He demanded that Walters be sent packing, and he was right to do so. But by bluntly stating ‘He goes or I go,’ he placed Margaret in an equally cruel impasse – even if, by appointing Walters, it was of her making. She agreed with Walters and not with her chancellor. She could not back away from that, nor did she wish to. If she sacked Walters it would be clear she had done so with a pistol at her head. She had relied on him far too long for his departure, if it occurred, to be seen as anything other than a climbdown. She remembered the Madrid summit of June 1989, when Nigel and Geoffrey Howe had combined to compel her to agree to join the ERM when certain conditions were met. To capitulate and sack Walters would have destroyed her authority.
All the elements of disaster were assembled, and there was no Willie Whitelaw to mediate. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor had dug themselves into positions which allowed no compromise. For the moment at least, Margaret
