Margaret Thatcher’s biographer claims John Major was the ‘most skilful actor’ in her fall, 30 years ago

Three decades ago, after a week of turmoil, the longest-serving postwar prime minister left office, writes John Rentoul

Margaret Thatcher and her husband Denis celebrating her 10 years as Conservative Party leader at 10 Downing Street, February 1985 (Getty Images)

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s authorised biographer, came to King’s College London on Wednesday to talk about her downfall, 30 years ago this week. He came, that is, by video apparition from his book-lined study, to attend a virtual session of the Strand Group, the centre for contemporary history at King’s. 

In conversation with Jon Davis, the director of the Strand Group, Lord Moore discussed what he learned from writing the third volume of his biography, Herself Alone, the paperback edition of which has just been published. 

Lord Moore recalled seeing Mrs Thatcher “not long after she left office”, and she said she was writing her memoirs. He asked: “What are you going to call them?” And she said: “Undefeated.” Which she was. “She won every single general election when she was leader, and she won the leadership election which caused her to resign. People forget that, but she won it,” said Moore. 

He said a good trick quiz question is: “Who got the largest number of votes in the Tory leadership election of 1990?” The answer is Margaret Thatcher, because she got more votes in the first ballot than John Major did in the second. She won 204 votes, which was a majority of Tory MPs, but the rules at the time required her to be 15 per cent ahead, and she was four votes short of that target. After she withdrew from the contest, accepting the advice of her cabinet that she would lose to Michael Heseltine on the second ballot, John Major then won 185 votes, not quite a majority (49.7 per cent), but Heseltine and Douglas Hurd then conceded. 

“So if you see it from her point of view,” said Lord Moore, “she’s thinking, ‘What on earth has happened? I’ve won everything; everything you’ve ever asked me to win, I’ve won. And you’ve got me out.’ So you can see why it’s such a trauma – and obviously that’s mainly a trauma in her heart, but it actually is a trauma for the Conservative Party, and caused tremendous trouble for many years afterwards.”

However, it is a mark of Lord Moore’s objectivity as a historian that he regards her fall as unavoidable. Although he was and is an admirer of hers – she did after all choose him to write her biography – he does not believe that if the events of this week 30 years ago had played out differently, she would have lasted much longer as prime minister. “I’m always hesitant about the ‘what-ifs’: I don’t think historians can answer them with the authority they claim,” he said. 

“But it was so close that a better campaign could surely have carried her over the line and prevented a second ballot. Particularly if she hadn’t gone to Paris, I think. But where would that have got anybody? It might have got her a breathing space; it might have got her the capacity to wait until the end of the Iraq war [the first Gulf war to expel Iraq from Kuwait], which was just coming – to win it, and then gracefully go. It might have been better for her – and the party – but it wouldn’t have saved her.”

He noted that one of the people who didn’t like the idea of her going “on and on” was Denis, her husband: “He said to her privately, in the May ’89 celebrations of the 10th anniversary, ‘You should now go.’ And she actually agreed with him – I don’t think she really agreed, but she said, ‘Yes, yes, you’re right,’ and made as if she might do something about it. But then she started making excuses about how the Queen wouldn’t want it because it would be difficult at some particular moment for some invented reason, knowing full well that she could speak of the Queen’s opinion without fear of contradiction, because nobody could prove it. And of course, she didn’t want to go; and if she wouldn’t listen to Denis, she certainly wouldn’t listen to everyone else.”

One of the finds of which Lord Moore is most proud is two letters from John Major to Peter Morrison, Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary and campaign manager, which reveal that Major was “the most skilful of the main actors in this drama”. They were written the night before she resigned and made clear what he was up to. “She wanted him to second her nomination for the second ballot; he didn’t want to do that, because that would rule him out – if she went forward to the second ballot, he couldn’t challenge her – but he didn’t want to tell her that he didn’t want to do that, because then she would regard that as treachery.

“So what he had to contrive was a way in which he said he would nominate her for the second ballot, but actually privately making sure that his nomination would not be cashed in. And so there were late-night conversations with Peter Morrison to establish this, and when it was announced that Major would second her, it was on the private, unannounced condition that that wouldn’t happen, and that she would actually go. So he scooped up the votes both of people who wanted Mrs Thatcher to go, and of people who were furious with Michael Heseltine. And therefore he won.”

Lord Moore said Major was able, and that it was natural that he should rise. “But I think she miscalculated the effect of Major as it pertained to her. Partly because he was her protégé, it was natural for him to wish to get out from under her shadow, and, I think, to resent her; and I think he did resent her. And after she left office, of course, he had cause to resent her, because she behaved pretty badly towards him later on. 

“So – as is often the way when you promote people who are your favourites – it doesn’t necessarily help you. I think it was Walpole who defined gratitude as ‘a lively sense of favours to come’ – and once the favours were no longer to come, but had come, Major wasn’t so keen on Mrs Thatcher.”*

Lord Moore was also clear about the underlying causes of Mrs Thatcher’s fall. One of the things that had surprised him in writing the book was the extent to which she, and the people trying to save her, “just didn’t know what was going on” among Tory MPs. She had lost touch with the backbenchers – and there is a warning there for Boris Johnson, although otherwise their situations are “very different”. 

It was her refusal to contemplate changing the poll tax that did for her among Tory MPs, who thought it would lose them the next election. Although Europe undermined her support at cabinet level, it was different for the wider electorate: “While she was extremely unpopular in the country about the poll tax, she was not unpopular about Europe – and I think that tells you something about what happened next.”

Lord Moore said: “She was viscerally anti-German.” She once took him aside at a party and said: “You know what’s the matter with Helmut Kohl?” Moore said he didn’t. “He’s a German.” But Lord Moore said she was right to see German unification – which she opposed – as leading to greater pressure for European integration, and she had public opinion on her side in resisting the drive towards monetary and political union.

Finally, I thought Lord Moore’s analysis of the effect of her fall on the opposition was deadly accurate. In answer to a question from the audience, he said: “Neil Kinnock said that, with her departure, Labour had lost its best asset; that’s a tremendously mistaken analysis of the effect of Thatcher, and the fact that Mr Kinnock thought that showed why they kept on not winning. 

“The first Labour leader to understand – and he told me a lot about this for my book – about the power of Thatcher, and her power to take Labour votes, was Tony Blair. He firmly believed – it was one of his biggest beliefs about reforming Labour and leading Labour – that they had to understand what a successful leader Thatcher was in order to understand how they could win.

“I think Neil Kinnock always thought, ‘She’s a bad person; our rhetoric will carry through; we’ll explain to people why she’s a bad person, and we’ll win.’ Blair said, ‘No, that’s not how it works. She’s a very remarkable, innovative leader, who touches a lot of chords with natural Labour voters. What we have to do is to separate the good bits of her, and learn from her leadership; jettison the bad bits; and – as it were – suck the Thatcher effect over to us.’ And that’s what he did, pretty successfully.”

A video of the Strand Group event is here; I mentioned the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography here and here; Lord Moore also came to the Strand Group five years ago to talk about the second volume. 

*According to William Hazlitt, “Walpole’s phrase” was “a lively sense of future favours”.