Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [257]
* British football fans had attacked Italian fans at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985, crushing thirty-eight of them to death when a wall collapsed. Twenty-six were later extradited from Britain to face charges in Belgium.
CHAPTER XV
Keeps Raining all the Time
The mid-term political difficulties of 1985–1986
A POLITICAL MALAISE
Whatever long-term political gains might accrue from the successful outcome of the miners’ strike, from the spring of 1985 onwards we faced accumulating political difficulties. Matters of no great importance in themselves, and often of limited interest to the general public, were invested within the hyperactive and incestuous world of Westminster with huge significance. The phenomenon is by no means uniquely British: my American friends tell me frequently of the gulf which separates the priorities of the ‘beltway’ from those outside it. So any democratic politician must be able to distinguish between the two — and recognize the pre-eminence of the second.
That spring the Labour Party started to move ahead of us in the opinion polls. In the local elections in May we lost control of a number of shire counties, mainly to the benefit of the SDP/Liberal Alliance. Francis Pym took the opportunity to launch a new grouping of Conservative MPs critical of my policies. The group was officially known as ‘Centre Forward’. Its failure to come up with any coherent alternative, however, caused it to be dubbed in a Times editorial as ‘Centre Backward’. A number of Francis’s supporters hurried to disclaim any connection with the group and after the initial flurry of publicity it sank into oblivion. But that did not alter the fact that, as the columns of the press showed daily, there were rumblings of dissent within the Parliamentary Party. I could not ignore them.
Opinions frayed further in July — always a bad-tempered time in British politics as MPs become restless to return to their constituencies, or in some cases to their villas in Chianti-shire. On Thursday 4 July we had a spectacularly bad by-election result at Brecon and Radnor, which was won by the Alliance on a swing of almost 16 per cent from the Conservatives: our candidate came in third. It was described — not quite accurately — as the worst Tory defeat since 1962. By-election results always have to be taken seriously, even though they are a poor indication of what would happen at a general election when people know they are voting for a government rather than registering a protest. But the press was full of unattributable criticism of the Government and of me personally which, having about it an unmistakeable whiff of panic, confirmed that the Parliamentary Party had a bad case of the wobbles.
Then a fortnight later the publication of our acceptance of the Top Salary Review Board (TSRB) recommendations provided the occasion for a large back-bench revolt in the House of Commons. What caused the outrage was the large increases for top civil servants. There was no doubt in my mind that we could not retain the right people in vitally important posts in government administration unless their salaries bore at least some comparison with their counterparts in the private sector. The cost of doing this to the public purse was, of course, only a tiny fraction of even a modest increase to large groups of public sector workers. I came to the conclusion that it was best to put the anomaly right at one go. When the Labour Party erupted I reminded them that Jim Callaghan had done the same thing in 1978. That said, we did not handle the issue well. Fear of leaks meant that those entrusted with explaining the rationale of our policy simply did not know about it in time. Even Bernard Ingham had been kept in the dark which, when he raised the matter with me afterwards, I conceded was absurd. In future we handled the TSRB announcements much more carefully. But for this occasion the damage had been done.
Generally, a political malaise spreads because underlying economic conditions are bad