̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Andrew Riley

̽��ֱ��lady is for turning (and reversing) – Thatcher archives for 1986 open to the public

sjr81 — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 14:54:50 +0000

̽��ֱ��Prime Minister’s personal papers for the year 1986, held at Churchill College, reveal the significant and ongoing fallout from the Westland affair – which prompted the resignation of Defence Minister Michael Heseltine, who went on to challenge Thatcher for the Tory leadership in 1990.

̽��ֱ��affair was bruising disagreement between Thatcher and Heseltine over a proposed rescue package for the UK’s last helicopter manufacturer – Westland. Heseltine favoured a European-based rescue package, while the PM favoured a US deal, with both sides using the press to brief against the other. Heseltine famously stormed out of a Cabinet meeting and resigned on January 9, 1986, accusing the Prime Minister of having lied during the course of the conflict.

Included in the 1986 papers is the text of a letter Thatcher drafted to Heseltine just three weeks before his eventual resignation – but did not send; an ultimatum to either toe the line or give up office. It ends bluntly: “In this situation, no Minister should use his position to promote one commercial option in preference to another – so long as he remains in Government.”

“ ̽��ֱ��important thing about this letter of course is that it was never sent,” said Chris Collins of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. “Throughout the crisis, Thatcher was wary of any course of action that might finally provoke Heseltine’s resignation or gather sympathy for him once he actually had, putting her in an uncomfortably and uncharacteristically defensive position. She knew she was dangerously isolated in Cabinet and among the Tory press where Heseltine had many friends.”

In many respects, 1986 was defined by Westland. Much happened in its shadow or was judged a consequence of it. It was also a genuine contest for power in the Conservative Party, one that Thatcher came close to losing.

“It’s no accident that Westland anticipated her final demise in 1990,” added Collins. “Many of the people were the same, the issues too. An argument in cabinet could not be contained and blew out into the street – with rivals chancing their arm against a dangerously isolated leader. ̽��ֱ��truth is that she was deeply conflicted, angry as hell but painfully aware of her vulnerability.”

Included in the archives, a day after the resignation, is a warning from her Political Secretary, Stephen Sherbourne, that she must be seen to be in control of events as they unfolded, not merely a bystander. “People want Prime Ministers to be in charge and they expect that from you,” says his letter.

Also among the papers being released today are those which reveal the scale of opposition for her support of President Reagan’s April bombing of Libya – including that of Norman Tebbit, Conservative Party Chairman, and historically one of Thatcher’s key supporters.

̽��ֱ��clear and continuing discord between the pair makes for uncomfortable reading according to Collins, with Tebbit and other leading figures such as Deputy PM Willie Whitelaw, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson among those vocal in their opposition to giving the US administration what they considered to be a ‘blank cheque’ in prosecuting its bombing campaign against Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya.

American F-111 bomber aircraft stationed at RAF Lakenheath were used in the raids on the Libyan capital Tripoli, which proved highly controversial in Britain. ̽��ֱ��raids gained major exposure thanks to the reporting of BBC journalist Kate Adie who was considered to have covered the story coolly and critically from Tripoli.

̽��ֱ��BBC coverage enraged Tebbit who launched a prolonged counterattack which alarmed Number Ten in both its style and substance. Once among Thatcher’s closest allies, by 1986, their relationship had deteriorated remarkably.

“Number Ten was keen to fight the next election at least in part on the issue of defence where Labour was vulnerable,” added Collins. “Anything that kept Libya in the headlines jeopardised that plan.”

Tebbit’s attacks on the BBC became so severe, and riled Home Secretary Douglas Hurd so much, that Nigel Wicks, Thatcher’s Personal Private Secretary, warned the PM that Tebbit’s ‘obsession’ with the BBC coverage risked repeating elements of the Westland affair all over again – going against the collective responsibility of the Government when things had appeared to be settling down.

Alongside larger worries about national and international affairs, the papers for 1986 also record the concerns of Mrs Thatcher’s advisors when it to plans for the Prime Minister to test drive the new Rover 800 in Downing Street – all in the name of lending a hand to the ailing car manufacturer British Leyland.

“There were predictable worries,” added Collins. “Her press secretary Bernard Ingham remembered a previous Rover test drive when the firm had delivered a red car. Officials were also worried that the Prime Minister’s driving skills might not be up to scratch!”

A quiet rehearsal was arranged at Chequers, with the car towed secretively under cover, while plans for the Downing Street drive were formalised. In the end, perhaps buoyed by her experience at Chequers, Mrs Thatcher not only drove the car along Downing Street, but also reversed it, pulling off the manoeuvre flawlessly in front of the assembled press.

Rover, rather cackhandedly, later attempted to sell her a discounted car under their “VIP Preferential Purchase Scheme”. ̽��ֱ��offer was never taken up.

Andrew Riley, Archivist of the Thatcher papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “Margaret Thatcher’s personal papers for 1986, released for the first time today at Churchill Archives Centre, provide unique insights into a year which ultimately proved to date a little over half way into her Premiership. Of course, no one knew in 1986 just how long she would stay at Downing Street but for the first time the issue of “succession” had been dramatically raised.

“Her political troubles are well documented in the release, especially the dramas of the Westland crisis and her isolation within Cabinet on a number of key foreign policy issues. ̽��ֱ��release gives a chance for a fresh look at the major political news stories of 1986 and a chance to understand something of the stress of the Prime Minister’s year.”

Margaret Thatcher’s isolation over Westland and the US bombing of Libya – as well as fears about the standards of her driving – are among the subjects revealed within 40,000 pages of her papers opening to the public today at the Churchill Archives Centre.

For the first time the issue of “succession” had been dramatically raised.

Andrew Riley

Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College

Portrait of Margaret Thatcher

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̽��ֱ��speech that never was – Thatcher papers for 1984 open to the public

sjr81 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 16:32:52 +0000

Draft pages of her intended speech – grabbed from the wreckage of the Grand Hotel following the attack on the Prime Minister on October 12, 1984 – detail how Thatcher planned to warn the country from the podium of the Conservative Party Conference that Britain faced ‘an insurrection’.

̽��ֱ��‘speech that never was’ went on to suggest that the Labour Party was the ‘natural home’ of forces whose ambition was to tear the country apart ‘by an extension of the calculated chaos planned for the mining industry by a handful of trained Marxists and their fellow travellers’.

Her own handwritten notes for the speech, released today by the Churchill Archives Centre (www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives) and online at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website (www.margaretthatcher.org ), suggest plans to link what she regarded as militant mining communities to General Galtieri – the Argentinian dictator defeated during the Falklands War of 1982. ̽��ֱ��note, released for the first time, reads: “Since Office. Enemy without – beaten him & resolute strong in defence. Enemy within – Miners’ leaders…Liverpool and some local authorities – just as dangerous…in a way more difficult to fight…just as dangerous to liberty.”

Chris Collins from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only historian to date to have had unrestricted access to the papers, said: “It was a speech which would have been remembered as controversial and would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech (delivered in private to the backbench 1922 Committee) Indeed it was intended to do that.

“There’s a certain irony that an act of great violence actually softened this speech. In the end, the original speech was torn up and later taped back together, probably by Thatcher herself, who was a dab hand with Sellotape.”

Among the other 40,000 papers being released online and at Churchill College, are documents which reveal the Prime Minister’s deep sense of foreboding about her fate at the hands of the Conservative Party she ruled, prophesising events of seven years later when she would be forced to resign as PM.

She told her secretary John Coles that: “My party won’t want me to lead them into the next election – and I don’t blame them.” Collins said he was amazed to find Mrs Thatcher imagining her own downfall just days after the 1983 General Election victory. ̽��ֱ��account, written when Coles left Number 10 in June 1984, also reveals that Thatcher’s doubts ran in parallel to a ‘decline in her energy’ after the election win.

More light-hearted pages from the 1984 archive reveal the prickly saga of a rose called Margaret, detailing – in a scene that could have been lifted straight from the scripts of Yes Prime Minister – how an innocent flower sparked a potential diplomatic incident between West Germany and Japan.

̽��ֱ��drama began in innocent enough fashion when a West German horticultural association asked for permission to name a rose after Margaret Thatcher, delighting officials in Whitehall wishing to perhaps promote a softer side to the ‘Iron Lady’.

However, the Prime Minister had forgotten an agreement of six years earlier, signed while Leader of the Opposition, that had given a Japanese firm license to grow the original ‘Margaret Thatcher Rose’.

̽��ֱ��clearly wounded Japanese firm wrote to the PM’s office and the Whitehall machine acted swiftly to pour oil on troubled diplomatic waters. ̽��ֱ��incident provoked many pages of notes between Whitehall and Foreign Office officials. In the end, it took a letter from private secretary Charles Powell to draw matters to a close. His reassuring tones of diplomacy to the slighted Japanese company headed off any threats of legal action and potential embarrassment to the Thatcher office.

Andrew Riley, Archivist of the papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This release of papers gives us a vivid insight into life at Downing Street and into Mrs Thatcher’s state of mind during a very difficult year, both personally and politically.

“ ̽��ֱ��papers provide fresh insights into the often bitter coal strike of 1984, as well as newly released materials on the impact and aftermath of the Brighton bomb.”

Papers opened to the public today reveal how the Brighton bombing stopped Margaret Thatcher from widening her infamous ‘enemy within’ rhetoric to include not only the striking miners but also the wider Labour movement and Party.

It was a speech which would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech.

Chris Collins

Churchill Archives Centre

A Sellotaped page from the speech that never was. Homepage image: Miner's strike, 1984 by Nick Sarebi (CC: Att)

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Thatcher papers reveal her ‘grimmest year’

sjr81 — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 06:00:35 +0000

More than 35,000 of Thatcher’s personal papers from 1981, a year of internal Tory splits, two cabinet reshuffles and the meteoric rise of the SDP - as well as spiralling unemployment and rioting across the UK - lay bare the politics and back-office story of Number 10 at a time when senior Conservatives worried about the very future of the party.

In conjunction with the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust, the papers have also been digitised and put online via the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website.

Chris Collins, of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, said: “This was the grimmest year of her tenure as Prime Minister. Politics in 1981 was dominated by the poor state of the economy; unemployment was rising (passing three million in January 1982) and continued rising for the next four years.

“In polling terms, support for the Conservatives dipped as low as a desperately poor 16pc. Thatcher’s net approval rating stood at minus 41 (the Government was minus 47). David Steel, by contrast, was plus 48.”

̽��ֱ��papers also reveal the difficult start to relations with the Reagan administration in America as senior Republicans and White House officials moved to distance themselves from the policies of the UK Government; the White House Press Secretary going as far as to hand the press a two-page document outlining the economic differences between Thatcherism and Reaganism.

However, the President himself made no direct criticism - even if he did not stop his juniors from doing so - and the foundations of that most famous transatlantic relationship can be seen to strengthen with each meeting between the two leaders. Thatcher even kept a page of doodles drawn by Reagan at the Ottowa G7 meeting.

Leading the country at a time of crisis could be a lonely business. Hints of the possible strains on the Prime Minister are revealed in a letter to someone who had sent her a cashmere rug as a gift (Thatcher was unusually engaged in personally replying to as much correspondence as she could).

In her letter of thanks, now kept in the strong rooms at the Archives Centre, she said: “It (the gift) came at a difficult time just when I needed a little thoughtfulness and kindliness. This task, to which I have set my hand is the most absorbing and fascinating in the world. But sometimes it is lonely as one struggles to take the right decision.”

̽��ֱ��archives also reveal a secret meeting between Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch at Chequers on January 4, 1981, where he told her about his bid to buy ̽��ֱ��Times newspaper and outlined his future plans, including his aim to introduce new technologies and reduce staff numbers.

This meeting may come as a surprise to many as the official history of ̽��ֱ��Times specifically denies there was any direct contact between the two during this period, footnoting Rupert Murdoch as the source of the information.

But it is the difficulty of sailing Government through 1981’s rough seas that emerges as the key theme from this year’s papers, released simultaneously at Churchill alongside those of fellow Conservatives Sir Bernard Ingham, Sir Adam Ridley, Sir Alan Walters and Sir John Hoskyns.

̽��ֱ��archives reveal some brutal in-fighting at Number 10 and beyond as party divisions led, unusually, to two reshuffles in a single year. Elsewhere, a key party donor is seen to express his deepest discontent while the chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee told Thatcher to her face of his unease with Government monetary policy.

Plans for a Party Political Broadcast in July, only days after the riots in Toxteth, also saw the head of the Policy Unit, John Hoskyns, scathingly damn the script by John Selwyn Gummer as “the worst example of platitude-laden undeliverable clichés and nonsense I have ever seen…it is terrible.”

That year’s Budget went down badly both in the party and among the public – opinion polls showing it to be the most unpopular for 30 years with only 24pc of the public believing Chancellor Geoffrey Howe to be doing a good job. Some 73pc thought the budget unfair (22pc believing it fair – the previous low being 33pc in 1961). And with strong echoes of today, by far the most unpopular aspect of the Budget was an increase in petrol duty – of which a massive 87 per cent disapproved.

Following a purge of the Cabinet ‘wets’ in the September reshuffle, Thatcher’s 1981 Government was then faced with a possible wets rebellion and the startling rise of the SDP. ̽��ֱ��Crosby by-election of November 13 brought the SDP its first MP, Shirley Williams. Overturning a huge Conservative majority of 19,000, Williams’ victory led Tory Central Office to believe it was staring into the abyss.

̽��ֱ��author of a Research Department document named ‘ ̽��ֱ��Way Ahead’ could see none and declared: “This new phenomenon (the Alliance)…threatens to sweep the Conservative Party into a small minority position, worse than anything we have experienced for over 100 years.”

And the archives also reveal that long before Meryl Streep played ̽��ֱ��Iron Lady, Thatcher agreed to attend a production of the farce Anyone for Denis, although the papers suggest she may have done so through gritted teeth, writing ‘NO’ no less than five times on a memo detailing the arrangements. Thatcher was played on that occasion by Angela Thorne with John Wells at Denis.

Finally, approaching the end of a fraught 1981, Thatcher’s Christmas card list was finalised with recipients including Fidel Castro, Colonel Gaddafi, General Pinochet, Ken Livingstone and Kim Il-Sung.

Thousands of papers relating to perhaps the toughest year of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership are to be opened to the public at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Churchill Archives Centre from Monday.

This task, to which I have set my hand is the most absorbing and fascinating in the world. But sometimes it is lonely as one struggles to take the right decision.

Margaret Thatcher

Churchill Archives Centre

Detail from a page of doodles by President Ronald Reagan, kept by Margaret Thatcher

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