opposition to itself, but not in quite the way Robin had envisaged. Within two years Margaret Thatcher was gone.
The history of this period has been written about extensively. An apparently cloudless sky in 1988 soon turned dark. It was the result of an overheated economy and the return of inflation, courtesy of shadowing the deutschmark, keeping interest rates too low for too long, and the encouragement of an unsustainable boom in house prices, partly through Nigel Lawson’s 1988 Budget.
Then followed rows over Europe, with Thatcher’s Bruges speech – which we in the CRD all applauded – the resignation of Lawson and the fateful decision to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Then the dénouement. The resignation of Geoffrey Howe and the fall of Thatcher. In the middle of all this, there was the Poll Tax. And believe me, I was right in the middle of it all. Europe was the occasion of the Lady’s fall, but the Poll Tax was the reason she couldn’t get up again.
So many of the team that worked together at the CRD all those years ago ended up, twenty years later, in prominent positions in my government, including Ed Llewellyn, Kate Fall, Steve Hilton, Ed Vaizey and Jonathan Caine. All of us worked for Thatcher and then John Major. The late 1980s and early 1990s shaped us and our thinking. First we were labelled ‘the brat pack’, because of our age. Later ‘the Notting Hill set’, even though most of us didn’t live there. Inasmuch as there was a clique – and I would argue that every successful politician needs a team – it was a CRD clique.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 confirmed us in the view that, with our beliefs in democratic politics and market economics, we were on the right side of history. The fall of Thatcher showed us that even the most successful authors of that history were mortal. It was an early experience of profound political trauma. She was the reason most of us were there in the first place.
My own view of her and the situation was nuanced. I was a supporter, but I did feel that ‘late Thatcher’ began to believe her own propaganda and somewhat lost touch with reality. I was a tremendous admirer of Nigel Lawson, and wanted those two titans to get over their differences.
Most supporters of Thatcher couldn’t abide Michael Heseltine. Again, I took a different view. I didn’t agree with his views on Europe, but I admired the muscular action he took to back British industry and to transform Liverpool and the inner cities. I liked the One Nation approach on poverty. And frankly, it looked as if he was being proved right on local government and the hated Poll Tax. If we were going to lose the Great One, wouldn’t it be better if her replacement was someone with a plan, with passion and with election-winning charisma?
When I became prime minister twenty years later, few people were more helpful to me than Michael Heseltine. He backed the coalition. He gave strength to our regional policy, particularly through his unstinting support for elected mayors and the real devolution to our cities of both money and powers. He rolled up his sleeves, occupied an office in the Business Department, and, in his inimitable way, he got things done.
But back then, when Mrs Thatcher was on the brink, I felt that one of the reasons he didn’t make it was a peculiar lack of charm. Not that he doesn’t have any – he certainly does – but that he didn’t always take the trouble to show it.
When the leadership challenge began, we at party headquarters were all supposed to be neutral. This order was not taken very seriously: most were passionate supporters of Mrs T. But by the end, while I was still loyal, I was unenthusiastic. I could see that her position was becoming untenable. When the new leadership campaign began after her fall, I was content to stay out of it altogether. What mattered, I thought a little piously, was continuing to implement Conservative ideas.
Despite my view that the end would come, when it did, the fall of Mrs Thatcher was still a political tragedy, one that affected all of us. More profound than personal feelings was the political impact: the leader of our country had been treated in a shabby and disloyal way by the very people she had helped to get elected in the first place. The resentments and divisions that this act of regicide created would affect Conservative politics for the next two decades. In fact, they still resonate.
Some of the lessons we learned from her fall were obvious: the importance of loyalty and teamwork; that leaders – particularly in our party – can never take their positions for granted. But there was something more subtle. We revered the reality of Thatcher, not the mythology.
The reality was a brilliantly effective prime minister who changed her country for the better, but who lost touch towards the end and was, in part, the author of her own downfall.
The mythology that grew and grew, particularly after her fall, was that she alone was ideologically pure; that she was always right and everyone else wrong; that she never compromised or backed down; and that she only ever did what was right, and never calculated what was politically deliverable.
This, of course, was nonsense. She backed down over many issues, like university tuition fees. She knew when to back off, as when giving in to the miners’ demands in the early 1980s. She was a master of political calculation.
The subsequent problem for the Conservative Party in general, and for future Conservative leaders in particular, is simply put. Not only were we following a hugely successful, epoch-defining leader. Not only did we need to heal the divide between those who supported her to the end and those who brought about her fall. We were also being compared to the mythical Thatcher, rather than the real one.
At about this time, the ageing doyen of Fleet Street, Sir John Junor, asked me to supply him with political gossip for his Mail on Sunday column, and I duly obliged, seeing it as part of my efforts to expose splits in the Labour Party. He frequently took me to lunch, at which the exchange of information would all be in the other direction. I would sit back and listen to his stories of Beaverbrook, Churchill and Fleet Street before Murdoch, together with his personal obsessions with Princess Diana and Selina Scott.
The journalist Bruce Anderson would fill in for Sir John when he was away, and I continued the service for him, starting what would become a lifelong friendship. Bruce was close to John Major, and recommended to him that he bring me into No. 10 to help sharpen up his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions.
This was the big call I had been waiting for, and I can still remember the thrill of walking through the famous black door to join the team that briefed the prime minister for what was then a twice-weekly encounter.
My partner in this endeavour was a rising star in the whips’ office, the Boothferry MP David Davis. Fifteen years later we would become rivals for the leadership, but in 1990 he would come to my office very early on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and we would discuss what bullets we could put into John Major’s gun. We worked together well.
Some people look at Prime Minister’s Questions, with all its noise, poor behaviour and often heavy-handed prepared jokes, and think it is somewhere between a national embarrassment and a complete waste of time. They miss the point. In our system, prime ministers have to be on top of their game and across every subject. PMQs exposes them if they are not. Weaknesses, failings, uncertainties, lack of knowledge – all these things and more are found out.
Not only does it help hold prime ministers to account; it gives them more power and control by enabling them to hold Whitehall to account. While serving in No. 10, I saw policy being either determined in double-quick time, or fundamentally changed, on many occasions because the spotlight was suddenly shining brightly on a particular area, and credible answers were urgently required. It is one of the mechanisms that makes our system so responsive. You can use it to change policy and override other ministers and departments. I did this a number of times when I became prime minister.
I got to know and like, and admire enormously, John Major. He was a passionate Conservative, but a practical one, not an ideologue. If he was unsure about how he should act on a particular issue, he seemed almost always to default to the decent thing. He had a temper, to be sure – and I was on the rough end of it once or twice – and parts of the job clearly weighed heavily on him. But he was a fundamentally good man.