MT's private files for 1989 - (4) leadership challenge

The "Stalking Horse": Would There Be One?

After the July 1989 reshuffle there had been a press story suggesting MT might be challenged for the party leadership in November by a “stalking horse” candidate. The Conservative leader was subject to annual re-election and no one had ever challenged MT, so she had been re-elected every year unopposed since 1975. But any Conservative MP could challenge her, in theory, provided they found a proposer and seconder. Lennox-Boyd and Onslow dismissed the article as mischief making, although she was advised to crank up her efforts to see backbenchers.

In fact, whatever its intent, the article proved quite prescient, even as to the number who might support the possible stalking horse. Lawson’s resignation suddenly made the thing a real possibility and speculation became widespread. Ingham was inclined to handle the issue jokily with the media, mocking “old nags” at the Sunday Lobby on 12 November, commenting that no Desert Orchid had yet appeared.

No.10 took the possibility more seriously in private. Lennox-Boyd briefed MT on 9 November regarding the timetable and tactics for a possible contest, “worst case” plans which he professed to think would not be needed. Helpfully, the timetable lay under the control of the sitting leader and the chairman of the 1922 Committee, so they chose dates designed to close nominations immediately after MT’s return from a US visit in November, following her Commons statement on the trip which was expected to show her in best light. Nominations should close as far as possible from the next European Council, due in Strasbourg 8-9 December, which might be expected to have the opposite effect.

MT herself publicly refused to discuss a challenge. Asked by Nick Lloyd on 5 Nov whether she thought there would be one, she briskly said “I’ve no idea” then moved the conversation swiftly on. But several times in the month after Lawson’s resignation she reformulated her position on how long she would remain leader, with disconcerting effect. The first was in an interview with with Sunday Correspondent on 1 Nov, which seemed to suggest she would depart some time during her fourth term, Lennox-Boyd telling her later that this remark had caused “lingering concern”. She had more to say on the topic in an off-the-record section of the Kelvin Mackenzie interview, frankly saying of the Sunday Correspondent interview that she had been trying to get away from the going “on and on” formula “which did me quite a lot of damage”. The Mackenzie interview is useful too on her explaination of why things were going badly for the government in the polls, where she focussed sharply on the economy:

I'm not talking about personalities ... I will tell you my belief. I'll tell you why I think we're down on the opinion polls. People do not expect a Tory Government to be back up at 7.6 percent inflation. They do not expect us to have that balance of payments deficit. They do not expect us to have such a high mortgage rate, particularly when half my life - political life - has been devoted to extending home ownership and capital.

And for this situation she clearly blamed Lawson, in terms she could not use in public:

if you let the money supply go and fix on exchange rates instead of keeping inflation down then you get it up. But the way of getting it down I'm afraid is not in doubt [increasing interest rates] but the higher it goes the tougher you have to be in getting it down now we shall and John [Major, the new Chancellor] will be very steady and it's got to come down. This is about the single most important thing.

Nov-Dec 1989: MEYER's CHALLENGE & POST MORTEM

That there would be a contest became clear when Sir Anthony Meyer declared his candidature, on 22 November 1989. It was a year to the day before MT announced that she would not fight the second ballot in the 1990 leadership election.

We have a useful note from Lennox-Boyd updating her on what was happening back home while she in the US. George Younger would head her campaign team, his name suggested not by her it seems, but by one of the whips, Tristan Garel-Jones. The document implies that the team operated at a certain distance from its candidate, not leaving her in the dark but forming many of its own judgments and acting on them. It was perhaps most effective acting that way, although there is still something curious if not ominous about its air of detachment.

Against a background of polls putting Labour as far as 14 points ahead, MT had another go at the leadership question in her interview with David Dimbleby for BBC1’s Panorama on 27 Nov. She reviewed her comments to the Sunday Correspondent, complaining that people had immediately concluded she would go shortly after winning a fourth term, which she would never do since it would mean fighting an election on false pretences. “And so the real position is quite simply this. I shall stay as long as the electorate and my own Party wish me to do. Not a moment longer, but I hope to stay as long as that”.

The campaign was certainly one-sided. It is not clear whether Meyer even had one; perhaps stalking horses are best advised not to. He received a terrible press from Thatcher supporting papers. On election day, Lennox-Boyd sent MT a prediction of the result in a sealed personal envelope, suggesting that she would win 300 of 374 votes, 80 per cent. “This will be a terrific victory”, and 300 might be exceeded he said. It was. Her final total was 314, with Meyer winning 33 and 24 spoiling their ballots, with 3 absent (Heseltine apparently among them). MT was invited to a celebratory glass of champagne with the whips after the 10pm vote.

But was it that good a result? At 5pm on 8 December, the Monday after the vote, Younger and Lennox-Boyd met MT at No.10 for a debriefing. Lennox-Boyd spelled out some painful truths in writing ahead of the meeting. Sixty Conservative MPs had failed to vote for her, but there were 50 more he classed as “reluctant supporters”. He went on: “It is obviously the case that if another 50 of your supporters become reluctant, your position becomes vulnerable”. Adding these three numbers together gives a total eerily close to the vote Heseltine amassed on the first ballot in November 1990. Younger also submitted a document, one which began with a punch: “The result is not as good as the figures. Many voted with varying degrees of reluctance for the Prime Minister. They cannot all be relied upon another time”. Some of his proposals echoed those of Bell, with the additional suggestion of “an early and visible change in Downing Street top advisers” (meaning Ingham and Powell).

The discussion seems to have had no great result. MT was not going to drop her closest advisers, abandon her leading role in foreign policy or turn herself into a travelling constituency circus, and it is not likely Younger and Lennox-Boyd expected her to. Lennox-Boyd’s list of follow-up points is very much at the minor end of the range. There is a sense of going through the motions.

Younger took a second document with him to the meeting. It is not in her files, but there is a second document in his, and perhaps they are the same. It is called “Post Mortem Meeting Notes”, a nine page note of discussion among the campaign team. It was published on this site some years ago. It takes the frankest possible form, participants coming back to the danger that she would face another contest in 1990 and, should there be one, the great difficulty she would have in winning it.

“We are talking about the beginning of the end of the Thatcher Era”, Garel-Jones said. And he was right.