There is No Alternative (49 page)

It is impossible to say if they were right about that. She never had the chance to put the matter to the test. “You might not like it,” says Powell, “but for eleven years, every time the British people were given a chance to express a view on it”—“it” being Thatcherism and Thatcher—“they supported it, voted for it, and I think she would have won the election in 1992 as well, had she stayed in. She was always a pragmatist. She always knew how to retreat sometimes. She was very good in Europe. You had to adjust, obviously, you could never have outright victory on anything in Europe, and she was very good at blowing smoke and retreating behind the smokescreen . . . on the poll tax, the community charge, she would have done exactly what John Major did, that is, loan some of the costs off of central taxation and make some changes, and I think would have won the 1992 election on the back of it. You always have to remember she was dislodged by a coup d'état, not by any democratic procedure.”

At the end of October 1990, upon returning from a European Council meeting in Rome, Thatcher again made it clear to the Commons that she was vehemently opposed to the idea of a European single currency and the development of a federal Europe. “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.” With this, she sucked in a great lungful of air, and then with all the drama of a concert soprano hitting the high note of a tragic aria cried out: “NO! NO! NO!”
²⁶¹

This spectacle pushed the long-suffering Howe over the edge. On November 1, 1990, he resigned.

It was obvious now to everyone—but her—that the rats were briskly paddling away. “I don't think she realizes what a jam she's in,” Alan Clark wrote in his diary. “It's the bunker syndrome. Everyone around you is clicking their heels. The saluting sentries have highly polished boots and beautifully creased uniforms. But out at the Front it's all disintegrating . . . whole units are mutinous and in flight.”
²⁶²

On November 13, Howe plunged the first dagger. His resignation speech was by far the best of his career. It was, in Thatcher's words, “cool, forensic, light at points, and poisonous.”
²⁶³
He would from then on be remembered, she predicted, “not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skilful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.” The evaluation is bitter, to be sure, but not unfair.
²⁶⁴
No one remembers Howe for anything but this speech.

It was essential, he warned,

As Thatcher had done years before, Howe summoned to arms the spirit of Winston Churchill:

He concluded on an ominous note. “I have done what I believe is right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.”
²⁶⁵

These words were widely interpreted as they were meant: They were an invitation to Michael Heseltine, Thatcher's longtime adversary, to force a leadership election.

Heseltine: Big hair. An oily charisma. A self-made millionaire with eight gardeners and a personal arboretum. The press called him “Tarzan.” On
Spitting Image
they depicted him in a superhero cape:
By day, Michael Heseltine is a suave millionaire MP. By night, he is a vain, ambitious little weasel.
“
The Tory Party Leadership? This is a job for Blondeman! Into the Blondemobile!”

Heseltine was more than ready to strike the coup de grâce. After months of declaring that he could “foresee no circumstances” under which he would challenge the prime minister, he suddenly saw them clearly.

On November 20, 1990, Heseltine was defeated, 204–152, in the first ballot for the party's leadership. But according to the party's rules, this was not sufficient to give Thatcher an outright victory. Thatcher was at the time at a summit in Paris. She did not return to campaign for the second round.

A fatal misjudgment.

She underestimated the seriousness of the challenge. She did not cajole or reassure her wavering supporters. “It's absolute madness,” wrote Clark in his diary. “There's no Party mileage whatever in being at the Paris summit. It just makes her seem snooty and remote. And who's running the campaign? Who's doing the canvassing? Who's putting the pressure on?”
²⁶⁶

Charles Powell understands her decision thus: “A lot of people say, ‘Well, why wasn't she in London for her reelection as Party leader instead of sitting in Paris at this great conference on the end of the Cold War?' And in her view,
of course
they were going to reelect her as leader of the Party after all she'd done for them. Why should she be groveling in the House of Commons' tea room soliciting votes from people who she created, got elected, had given ten years in government? I mean, they
owed
it to her, her right place was representing Britain in the triumphal conclusion of the Cold War, and it never occurred to her to go. I think that attitude—it's perfectly easy to understand, but that's what brought her down.”

“The whole house is in ferment,” wrote Clark. “Little groups, conclaves everywhere . . . in the corridors it is all whispering and glancing over shoulders . . . a great basket of bitterness, thwarted personal ambition and vindictive glee. Talk of country, or loyalty, is dismissed as ‘histrionics.'”
²⁶⁷

In the end, one of Thatcher's great strengths—her ability to stand remote from the men around her—became her great liability. “One of the qualities that men tend to have,” Nigel Lawson says to me, “or Englishmen, you know, from the sort of background that most of the cabinet came from, is clubbability. They're extremely clubbable. And there's a kind of men's club atmosphere. She had no element of clubbability in her at all. Now, I say this is both a strength and a weakness. It was a strength because it disconcerted the men. They didn't quite know how to deal with a leader who was unclubbable. And this therefore made it easier for her to exert the power she wished to exert and the leadership she wished to exert.

“It was a disadvantage because it did rather, and increasingly, separate her from the rest of her cabinet, all of whom were men . . . So it was an all-male cabinet and she became separated because of this lack of clubbability, not merely from the people she may have not minded being separated from, but also from her actual supporters within the cabinet. And this contributed to her downfall in two ways. The most important way is that she did become rather out of touch, and she didn't—obviously, she thought she was completely self-sufficient—she didn't need anybody else. She also didn't interact, after a time. She did in the beginning, when she first came in, but less and less so . . . and that made her less sure-footed. And the other thing of course is that it meant that there wasn't, when she stood for the leadership . . . there wasn't the degree of emotional support from her colleagues that I think she thought she deserved.”