Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [227]
As always, the Conservative Party Conference followed straight on from Labour’s. Much of my time at Brighton was spent following as best I could the course of negotiations between the NUM and the NCB at the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). A delegation from NACODS was also present at ACAS, though not directly involved in the negotiations. It was clear that NACODS was trying to win terms for the NUM which would have allowed Mr Scargill to claim victory. NACODS leaders were making threats with this in mind, claiming that their members could not be restrained much longer from beginning their strike and so on. Tactics became at this stage of the greatest importance. The NCB tabled a paper which accepted an independent review body on pit closures and they committed themselves to give proper consideration to its views, though obviously they would retain the right to take management decisions. ACAS then put forward a variation on this which the NCB immediately accepted and the NUM promptly rejected. We were still not to know how NACODS would react. But for once the NCB had obtained an important tactical advantage in negotiations.
These discussions spanned our Party Conference. Leon Brittan and Peter Walker both delivered powerful defences of our position during it. But the event which dominated our thoughts at that time was the IRA bomb at the Grand Hotel which killed five of our friends and came near to killing me, members of the Cabinet and many others.*
Among the messages I received afterwards was one from Mrs Gandhi, whom I knew well and admired. Within three weeks she was the victim of a brutal assassination by two of her own bodyguards.
THE TIDE TURNS
Towards the end of October the situation changed sharply once again. Three events within a week were particularly hopeful for us and must have come as hammerblows to Mr Scargill. First, on Tuesday 24 October the NACODS executive agreed not to strike after all. Precisely what happened is unclear. In all probability the moderates on the executive convinced the hardliners that their members simply would not act as stooges for Mr Scargill.
Second, it was at this point that the civil law at last began to bite. I have already mentioned a case which had been brought against the NUM by two Yorkshire miners: the High Court had ruled in the two miners’ favour that the strike in Yorkshire could not be described as ‘official’. The NUM had ignored the ruling and as a result a writ had been served on an astonished Mr Scargill actually on the floor of the Labour Party Conference. On 10 October both he and the union had been found in contempt of court and fined £1,000 and £200,000 respectively. Mr Scargill’s fine was paid anonymously, but the NUM refused to pay and the High Court ordered its assets to be sequestrated. It soon became evident that the NUM had prepared for this event, but the financial pressure on the union was now intense and its ability to organize was greatly hampered.
Finally, on Sunday 28 October — only three days after the sequestration order — the Sunday Times revealed that an official of the NUM had visited Libya and made a personal appeal to Colonel Gaddafi for his support. This was astonishing news and even Mr Scargill’s friends were dismayed. At the beginning of October, Mr Scargill (travelling under an alias as ‘Mr Smith’) had visited Paris with his colleague Mr Roger Windsor to meet representatives of the French communist trade union, the CGT. Present at the meeting was a Libyan whom Mr Scargill later claimed to be a representative of Libyan trade unionists — a rare breed, in fact, since Colonel Gaddafi had dissolved all trade unions when he came