How does the Queen conduct relations with her Prime Minister? If Tony Blair is to be believed, recalling in his memoirs the first time he went to the Palace in 1997, she behaves word-for-word in exactly the way the screenwriters imagined in the film The Queen – which came out long before Blair’s tome. But we have only glimpses to go on. Bagehot, when Victoria was on the throne, observed: “There is no authentic explicit information as to what the Queen can do, any more than of what she does”. This remains true. We simply don’t know on what occasions and in what manner the current monarch intervenes. Or do we?
It is 29 years since Margaret Thatcher was ousted from office. Until that happened, the removal of a sitting Prime Minister, in good health and determined to carry on, had been thought largely impossible.
Subsequently, there was an acrimonious argument about whether the outcome was self-inflicted, engineered by a conspiracy among some of her colleagues or brought about by force of circumstance. The one point on which all accounts agreed was that any need for royal involvement did not arise – for which we should be grateful.
Thatcher herself was both a loyal and a discreet subject. The public rhetoric of her final term, however, was all of a piece with her private dealings with Her Majesty. Intriguing new evidence indicates the significant part Elizabeth II played in Thatcher’s final days.
This is actually a single, connected story. In the late 1980s, when Thatcher turned her fire on the “Belgian empire” in Brussels, the Queen was her trump card. The monarchy was, according to the Iron Lady, the United Kingdom’s greatest national possession. Sovereignty meant first and foremost the defence of the sovereign. This served several purposes. Opposition to European federalism was effectively popularised. The Labour Party, supposedly “soft” on Europe, was made to look unpatriotic. And it fitted with Thatcher’s personal preoccupations. Unlike her European counterparts, a British Prime Minister returning home from European summit meetings had to give a full account to parliament and, in person, to the monarch. The proposal to create a single European currency brought this home. “How”, Thatcher demanded, “can I possibly go to the Queen and tell her that her head is no longer to appear on the banknotes?” With the Conservatives lagging badly behind Labour in the opinion polls, “Queen and country” was an issue on which a referendum, even a general election, could be fought and won.
Thatcher’s Tory critics were alarmed. Not only was she damaging Britain’s interests, she was muddling up sovereignty with her own self-rule. Geoffrey Howe, in his resignation speech, spoke of the Prime Minister retreating into “a ghetto of sentimentality”. Triggering a contest for the leadership of the Conservative party, Michael Heseltine ridiculed her pretence at having “saved” the Queen. “Of course, you will get a lot of support. But, of course, the monarchy was never at risk”. A “Who governs?” election, he argued in a calculated appeal to nervous Tory backbenchers, would be a catastrophe.
Woodrow Wyatt, the former Labour MP and one of Thatcher’s principal newspaper cheerleaders, was also one of her most trusted associates. In his published diary covering November 1990, it is apparent that she was convinced she was untouchable. It is even clearer in hitherto unpublished diary entries, kept under lock and key by Waytt’s executors. In the unlikely event of being beaten by Heseltine in the leadership ballot, she confided to Wyatt, she wouldn’t resign. She would still be Prime Minister because the two jobs – Prime Minister and party leader- were constitutionally separate. She repeated this to him a couple of days later, adamant that she would fight on until she was defeated on the floor of the House of Commons.
Wyatt initially advised her to keep quiet for the time being and follow this course, if need be, as a last resort. At the 11th hour, he changed tack, expecting to shore up her support. In his column in the News of the World (called, seemingly without irony “The Voice of Reason”) and then, with Thatcher’s blessing, in The Times on the morning of the first ballot, Wyatt wrote that a sitting Prime Minister could only be removed by a vote of no confidence in the House Commons, that they even then had the right to ask for a dissolution of Parliament and that “We may depend upon it that this would be her position”. The threat was evident. Tory rebels seemed to think they could change the leader without bringing down the Government. Wyatt was warning that, if they were foolish enough to try to get rid of Thatcher, a general election must inevitably follow. In the end, Thatcher had a majority in the first round of voting but narrowly failed, under the rules of the contest, to obtain a large enough margin of victory to win outright. Wyatt’s clumsy intervention had backfired.
By continuing to press the matter on the critical next day, he added to the turmoil in Conservative ranks. Busily phoning senior party figures, he suggested that one at least of the Queen’s unofficial constitutional advisers, Lord Blake, took the view that Thatcher had every right to carry on unless and until she lost the confidence of the Commons – and to follow that up with a request for a general election, which the Queen would be likely to grant. Rumours soon spread that the Prime Minister, facing defeat in the second round, was toying with the idea of a snap election. In her wilder moments, many Labour MPs asserted, she was “capable of anything”.
To add to the confusion, Labour hurriedly tabled a motion of no confidence in the Government, hoping to compel the Tories into rallying behind their beleaguered leader. For an extraordinary 24 hours, the Labour Party was Thatcherite and Dennis Skinner a fervent royalist.
Consulting with colleagues, Thatcher had already learned that her support was slipping. Nevertheless, her instinct was to fight on. Her new campaign manager, John Wakeham, proposed that she see Cabinet ministers one by one to hear their views. Quite by chance, in the midst of all the upheaval, she was scheduled to see the Queen for her weekly audience. She arrived at Buckingham Palace just before 5.30pm, remaining with Her Majesty for just under half-an-hour. What did they talk about? Thatcher began by giving the Queen an outline of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which she had attended in Paris. She then turned to the Tory leadership election, confirming she intended to contest the second round. The Queen is famously well-informed. Whether she was better informed than the Prime Minister about the drift of opinion among ministers is an interesting question. The leadership election was for the Conservative Party to settle and the Queen could not take sides.
However, Labour’s motion of no confidence, to be debated the next day, meant that the future of Her Majesty’s Government was now at stake. On this score, she was entitled to seek assurances. If the Government were to lose the vote and Thatcher were to ask for Parliament to be dissolved, the Prime Minister would need to make quite sure that this was the collective view of the whole Cabinet. Thatcher would have to carry her ministers with her. In any case, if the Prime Minister chose to sit tight regardless of the final result of the leadership contest, it would put the monarch in great difficulty, jeopardising her impartiality – an unfortunate outcome for the Prime Minister who had been singing the praises of the historic role of the crown. In the judgment of one witness close to the Prime Minister, the audience with the Queen had a “profound effect”.
Thatcher maintains she was perfectly aware she couldn’t last in office “for one hour” without the backing of her Cabinet colleagues. She knew full well she was “at their mercy”. The clue is in the words she chose to try to keep open her options. She had not lost a general election. She had not lost a vote of confidence. She had actually won the first round of the leadership ballot. Yet it was being suggested she should not continue. What did they think?
Almost to a man, ministers brushed her constitutional considerations aside. She would lose to Michael Heseltine in the second round and the Conservative Party would be split down the middle, destroying it as a political force and opening the door of Number 10 to Neil Kinnock. During this time, Wyatt had been frantically trying to get in touch with her. He did succeed in getting through to Rupert Murdoch, who Thatcher had been trying to call. He urged Murdoch to phone her back to urge her to hold on and even to consider an immediate general election. The Sun duly took up the line, saying that Thatcher had “rammed home her message by calling on the Queen and insisting she will stay on as Prime Minister” come what may.
To his fury and frustration, Wyatt was only able to contact Thatcher again when it was all over. Why, he wanted to know, hadn’t she stayed put, as was her right? She had had, she said, to think of the good of the party – and the country. But the denial of her right to go before Parliament and the electorate was what rankled. In her own mind, she did not resign. She was forced to “surrender”.
How does the Queen do what she does? Wyatt, although he was sceptical about long-standing tales of royal hostility to Thatcher, was in no doubt that he had been embroiled in a very instructive episode. In retrospect, Thatcher supplied a telling answer, mindful of her own experience. It was, after all, “useful” and “important” for the Prime Minister to have to report to Her Majesty about what was going on, she said. It “keeps the PM in order”.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, intent on manipulating the law to strengthen its own security of tenure, would do well to pay heed.
