Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [517]
Nor, however, did I seriously intend to go ‘on and on’. I thought that about two years into the next Parliament would be the right time to leave. Of course, even then it would be a wrench. I felt as full of energy as ever. But I accepted that one day it would be my duty to leave No. 10, whether the electorate had demanded it or not.
What would not persuade me to depart, however, was the kind of argument put to me by Peter Carrington over dinner at his house one Sunday evening in April 1990. Denis was not there: he was away for the weekend. Peter argued that the Party wanted me to leave office both with dignity and at a time of my own choosing. I took this to be a coded message: dignity might suggest a rather earlier departure than I would otherwise choose. Peter was, I suspect, speaking on behalf of at least a section of the Tory establishment. My own feeling was that I would go ‘when the time was ripe’. I reflected that if the great and the good of the Tory Party had had their way, I would never have become Party leader, let alone Prime Minister. Nor had I the slightest interest in appearances nor in the trappings of office. I would fight — and, if necessary, go down fighting — for my beliefs as long as I could. ‘Dignity’ did not come into it.
GEOFFREY HOWE’S RESIGNATION
The restiveness of Tory back-benchers was transformed into open panic by the Eastbourne by-election later in October. Ian Gow’s old seat went to the Liberals with a swing of 20 per cent. The opinion polls also looked bad. Labour had a substantial lead. This was not a happy background to the Rome summit which I attended over the weekend of 27–28 October.** Yet even as I was fighting a lone battle in Rome, Geoffrey Howe went on television and told Brian Waiden that we did not in fact oppose the principle of a single currency, implying that I would probably be won round. This was either disloyal or remarkably stupid. At the first Prime Minister’s Questions on my return, I was inevitably asked about his remarks. I countered Opposition taunts by saying that Geoffrey was ‘too big a man to need a little man like [Neil Kinnock] to stand up for him’. But I could not endorse what he had said.
And my difficulties were just beginning. I now had to stand up in the House and make my statement on the outcome of the Rome summit. I duly stressed that ‘a single currency is not the policy of this Government’. But this assertion — which I considered essential — had two important qualifications. The first was that our own proposal for a parallel or ‘common’ currency in the form of the hard ecu might evolve towards a single currency. The second was a form of words, which ministers had come to use, that we would not have a single currency ‘imposed upon us’. And, inevitably, there were differing interpretations of precisely what that delphic expression meant. Such hypothetical qualifications could be used by someone like Geoffrey to keep open the possibility that we would at some point end up with a single currency. That was not our intention, and I felt there was a basic dishonesty in this interpretation. It was the removal of this camouflage which — if any single policy difference mattered — probably provided the reason for Geoffrey’s resignation.
I said in reply to questions that ‘in my view [the hard ecu] would not become widely used throughout the Community — possibly most widely used for commercial transactions. Many people would continue to prefer their own currency.’ I also expressed firm agreement with Norman Tebbit when he made the vital point that ‘the mark of a single currency is not only that all other currencies must be extinguished but that the capacity of other