Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [259]
I had to move Leon; but was I right to move him to the DTI? Although the main fault in what lay ahead certainly resided elsewhere, Leon’s attitude on going to his new department carried its own dangers. He was obviously shaken — friends later described him as somewhat demoralized — and determined to make his political mark. As a result he proved oversensitive about his position when the Westland affair blew up. All this made for errors of judgement when facing a ruthless opponent like Michael Heseltine. It turned out that the DTI had even more pitfalls for this civilized but not very streetwise politician than did the Home Office. At the time, however, it seemed that this was a job which would put Leon less in the limelight, while making the most of his formidable intellect and phenomenal industry, which was what I wanted. But even had Leon weathered Westland he would have found himself in difficulties over the question of privatizing BL.
Leon’s position turned out therefore to be the key to the plan for the reshuffle. It might have worked out differently. For I thought long and hard about bringing Cecil Parkinson back to the Cabinet. I missed his dry views and great presentational skills. But my advisers were divided on the merits of doing so and in the end I reluctantly concluded that it was too soon.
There were three departures from the Cabinet. Nigel Lawson had become almost as irritated with Peter Rees as Chief Secretary as Geoffrey Howe had been with John Biffen. Peter was an able tax lawyer and an amiable colleague. I always got on well with him. But I took the view that a Chancellor has the right to select his own subordinates. At Nigel’s request, I replaced Peter with John MacGregor. John had a good financial brain as he had shown as part of the Shadow Treasury team. Although I considered him very much a Ted Heath man, I had been impressed by his acumen and diligence and felt he would do this demanding job well — which he did.
Grey Gowrie — after only a year in Cabinet, as Leader of the House of Lords — to my great regret decided that he wanted to earn more than a Cabinet member who was a peer — and therefore had no MP’s salary — was able to do. He decided to go back into business. He had a fine, highly cultivated mind and great style. I had offered him the job of Secretary of State for Education, planning to keep Keith Joseph, who I knew was thinking of retirement, as minister without portfolio. But that was not to be. Keith agreed to stay at Education a little longer.
I regretted in a different way the loss of Patrick Jenkin. No one could have been more conscientious than Patrick — loyal, kind, selfless. But I could not have the constant haemorrhage of political support which his inability to put over a case in the Department of the Environment caused. I was becoming increasingly worried about what to do with the rating system which would be an even more difficult issue than GLC abolition. So I appointed Ken Baker to succeed Patrick. It was a good decision. Ken turned the tables on the Left, proved a superb communicator of our policies and was the foster-father of the community charge.
I had brought David Young into the Cabinet as minister without portfolio the previous year and I now had him succeed Tom King, who went to be Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It is difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than David and Tom. I had started off with a wrong view of Tom King, inherited from Opposition. I had thought that he was a man with a taste for detail who, when I made Michael Heseltine Secretary of State for the Environment in 1979, would complement Michael’s very broad-brush approach. I then made the uncomfortable discovery that detail was not at all Tom’s forte, as the way in which we became steadily more enmeshed in almost incomprehensible formulae for rate support grant amply demonstrated. At Employment — in particular on the whole question of trade union political funds