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By Root 3116 0

Thursday 2 August hardly a day had passed without my involvement in diplomatic and military moves to isolate and defeat Iraq. One of my very few abiding regrets is that I was not there to see the issue through. The failure to disarm Saddam Hussein and to follow through the victory so that he was publicly humiliated in the eyes of his subjects and Islamic neighbours was a mistake which stemmed from the excessive emphasis placed right from the start on international consensus. The opinion of the UN counted for too much and the military objective of defeat for too little. And so Saddam Hussein was left with the standing and the means to terrorize his people and foment more trouble. In war there is much to be said for magnanimity in victory. But not before victory.

* See p. 800.

* See pp. 89–90.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Men in Lifeboats

The background to and course of the 1990 Conservative Party leadership campaign — and resignation

BACKGROUND TO THE 1990 LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN

In 1975 I was the first candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party to challenge an existing leader under the rules which had been instituted by Sir Alec Douglas-Home a decade earlier. Having entered the field as a rank outsider, I won the leadership in an open contest. So I am the last person to complain about having to meet a challenge to my own leadership. But the circumstances of 1990, when Michael Heseltine challenged me, were very different. I had won three general elections and lost none, whereas Ted Heath had lost three out of four. I was a sitting prime minister of eleven and a half years in office, whereas Ted was a newly-defeated Opposition leader. The beliefs and policies which I had pioneered in Britain were helping to remould world affairs. And our country was at that moment on the verge of war in the Gulf.

Of course, democracy is no respecter of persons, as my great predecessor, Winston Churchill, learned when having led Britain through her supreme struggle against the Nazi tyranny and in the midst of negotiations crucial to the post-war world order, he was defeated in the 1945 general election. At least, however, it was the British people who dismissed him from office. I was not given the opportunity to meet the voters — and they were not able to pronounce on my final term of office, except by proxy.

The 1965 procedure for electing the Tory leader was, by unwritten convention, not intended for use when the Party was in office. Theoretically, I had to be re-elected every year; but since no one else stood, this was a formality. Ever since Michael Heseltine flounced out of the Cabinet in January 1986, however, he had kept up a constant if unavowed campaign to replace me. Inevitably, as problems mounted in late 1988 and 1989, closer attention was paid to the precise details of the system.

I have already described the growth of political discontent in the summer and autumn of 1989. Of its causes, the most important was the economy, as high interest rates had to be applied to curb the inflation which Nigel Lawson’s policy of shadowing the deutschmark had generated. This aggravated what would otherwise have been more manageable problems, such as the agitation over the community charge — a running sore which would get much worse the following year. There was also a hard core of opposition to my approach to the European Community, though this was very much a minority view. And there was, of course, a range of back-benchers who for various idiosyncratic reasons, or because they had been denied or removed from office, would be happy to line up against me. There was even talk of one of them putting up for the leadership as a ‘stalking horse’ for the real contender, Michael Heseltine, lurking in the wings.

In fact, Sir Anthony Meyer decided to mount a challenge for reasons of his own in 1989, and there had to be a contest. Mark Lennox-Boyd, my PPS, George Younger, Ian Gow, Tristan Garel-Jones (a Foreign Office Minister of State), Richard Ryder (Economic Secretary) and Bill Shelton constituted my campaign team who quietly identified