personality. If Margaret were to face a contest, Michael was by far the most formidable opponent on offer.
At the time, I was no ally of his. Apart from his help to me over the peace camp at Molesworth in 1984, I knew little of him. He was friendly, but he moved in a different circle. I did not wish to see a challenge to the Prime Minister, and did not support Michael. My loyalties remained where they were. I was forty-seven and had the job in politics I had always coveted – Chancellor of the Exchequer. I hoped to remain chancellor until the general election. Thereafter, I assumed there were two possibilities. The first, which the opinion polls said was likely, was that we would lose to Labour, in which case I expected Margaret would retire soon after and we would elect a new leader of the party. I would not have been a candidate. I did not wish to be leader of the opposition. Opposing is a special art, and Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke and Chris Patten were all more suited to it than myself. In such circumstances I would have wished to take a leading shadow portfolio, possibly returning to foreign affairs.
If, though, we won the general election, it would have been my wish to stay as chancellor for about a year and then move back to the Foreign Office or to the Home Office. And then, insofar as I thought of it at all, I expected Margaret to retire as prime minister during the course of that Parliament. Her departure from Downing Street before the election never crossed my mind as a serious proposition.
I was aware that some in the party saw me as Margaret’s long-term successor. Soon after I became chancellor, Peter Morrison, the Prime Minister’s patrician PPS, and Francis Maude, the ascetic Financial Secretary to the Treasury, came to see me to say they believed I was well-placed to be the next leader of the Conservative Party. Peter invited me to his house for drinks to tell me I should stand ‘after she’s gone’. Our conversation was private, but Peter was an intimate of the Prime Minister, and his message was clear enough. Whether or not Margaret knew what he was up to, he would not have said such things had he thought she might disapprove.
Peter Morrison was a classic Tory figure whose father had been Chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers. Although a few months younger than me, he had been in the House since 1974, and was one of those MPs who do not seek office for themselves, thinking – rather modestly, in his case – that they are not fitted for it, but who want to see their party successful and in government. I was flattered by his confidence in my future. ‘Maybe. It’s a long time ahead,’ was all I said. Nothing more. No plans were made, and nothing came of it.
Over the weekend after Geoffrey’s resignation, Michael Heseltine sent a public letter critical of the leadership to his constituency chairman. It was a warning shot, hardly obscured by his statement early the next week: ‘I think Mrs Thatcher will lead the Conservative Party into the next election and the Conservative Party will win it.’
Number 10 responded by encouraging an early date for any leadership contest, in order to ‘flush out’ any challengers. They dismissed Geoffrey’s resignation as a conflict over style, not substance, another error of judgement which only served to further infuriate Geoffrey, leading him to retort in his resignation statement in the Commons: ‘I must be the first minister in history to resign because he was in full agreement with government policy.’ And Michael Heseltine was taunted in lobby briefings for the press that he should ‘put up or shut up’.
But the backbench rats began to desert the Prime Minister. Tony Marlow, the populist MP for Northampton North, was the first off the ship, declaring that there would be ‘a new prime minister by Christmas’. Even after all that had happened, this seemed a barmy remark. But Tony was always around the Commons, and he turned out to be more in touch with backbench opinion than anyone realised. The press began to sense drama. Malcontents stalked the parliamentary lobbies, and trouble mounted.
It was Geoffrey’s devastating resignation speech on 13 November which brought all this to a head. In her memoirs, Margaret calls it ‘poisonous’. But he was driven to it. As Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey had been a perfect foil for Margaret’s more strident tone. But just as in partnership she had relied on his strength of purpose, in battle she had ignored it at her peril. The iron had entered into his soul, and he responded accordingly. ‘People throughout Europe see our Prime Minister finger-wagging, hear her passionate “No, No, No” much more than the content of carefully-worded formal texts,’ he said. ‘The task has become futile … of trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer.’
I felt a mixture of agreement and dismay as he addressed a Chamber listening intently to every nuance. When he spoke of the way in which the Prime Minister had destroyed the hard ecu I could only agree. Still, I had not expected Geoffrey to deliver a speech which would destroy her. Geoffrey’s steel has always been underestimated due to his easy-going manner. Again it was Margaret Thatcher’s folly that she ignored this side of his character. Quite simply, she had disregarded all his private arguments; this was his only chance to put the record straight publicly. That was what he was doing. As I looked around the House I could not see the faces of my colleagues behind me, but I could see the reaction of the Labour and Liberal Members across the floor of the House. Their pleasure at Margaret’s discomfort turned to glee as, to follow Geoffrey’s cricketing metaphor, ball after ball hit the stumps.
I was sitting on the front bench beside Margaret. It was a struggle to know how to react. She was tense from top to toe, and it would have been utterly unconvincing to turn to her with comforting words; we sat in silence, listening and, in my case, wondering what would happen next, and how we could cope with the fallout. What defence would we have to the charge that the two great architects of Thatcherism had both repudiated the Prime Minister? Bernard Ingham, Margaret’s loyal spokesman, had insisted that Geoffrey’s departure was merely over a matter of style. Geoffrey’s resignation speech had shown all too clearly that it wasn’t, and had made stark the division in the Conservative Party; the iceberg to which Nigel Lawson had alluded in his resignation speech, formerly nine-tenths hidden, had now emerged above the waves.
Afterwards, I spoke to Margaret in the Prime Minister’s room behind the Speaker’s Chair. She knew well enough the political damage Geoffrey’s speech had done her, though not, I think, that it would precipitate a leadership election. It appeared to me that her principal concern was what the speech revealed about her fractured relationship with Geoffrey. I do not think she understood how it had come about, how hurt he must have been by the disdain that she had heaped upon him. We sat for a while, and I tried to put the best gloss I could upon what had happened. I could not pretend that it was anything but a serious setback, and I did not. I offered Margaret the hopeful analysis that the speech might be cathartic, causing her colleagues to rally round her. I suggested too that as she was beleaguered, a lot of sympathetic support might emerge.
It was not to be. Geoffrey’s call in his resignation statement for ‘others to consider their response’ brought Michael Heseltine out into the open: ‘I am persuaded that I would now have a better prospect of leading the Conservatives to a fourth election victory,’ he announced the following morning from the steps of his home.
Douglas Hurd and I were immediately asked by Peter Morrison to propose and second the Prime Minister’s nomination for the leadership contest which would now take place. I did so without reservation. It seemed natural to me that the Prime Minister should be backed by her Foreign Secretary and her Chancellor. Despite my concerns I believed Margaret had earned the right to contest the next election as prime minister, and to let the electorate judge her record as a whole. I thought it bad politics to attempt to remove a sitting prime minister, and in no circumstances would I have stood against her.
Those with more recent memories of leadership contests within the Conservative Party might find it surprising that, though a contest was actually under way, on this occasion the Cabinet thought it its duty to stand foursquare by the Prime Minister. But we did. I and, to the best of my knowledge, all my Cabinet colleagues but one, David
