Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [521]
What really set the political commentators talking, however, was a statement that day by Geoffrey that he would ‘be seeking an opportunity in the course of the next few days to explain in the House of Commons the reasons — of substance as well as style — which prompted [his] difficult decision’. The speculation that Michael Heseltine would stand naturally increased over the weekend. Indeed, politics entered one of those febrile nervous phases in which events seem to be moving towards some momentous but unknowable climax almost independent of the wishes of the actors. And there was little I could do about any of this. I soldiered on with my arranged programme in the constituency on Saturday (10 November) and at the Cenotaph Remembrance Day Service on Sunday (11 November).
On Monday (12 November), as the previous week, there was only one subject on our minds at my morning ‘Week Ahead’ meeting with Ken Baker and at the subsequent lunch with colleagues — and again, significantly, none of us really wished to talk about it. No one knew as yet what Geoffrey would say, or even when he would say it. But never had a speech by Geoffrey been so eagerly awaited.
I delivered my own speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in Guildhall that evening, striking a deliberately defiant note. But words now began to fail me. I employed a cricketing metaphor which that evening drew warm applause but which would later be turned to my disadvantage:
I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground.
THE LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN OPENS
I had now learned that Geoffrey would speak in the House the following day, Tuesday 13 November, about his resignation. I would, of course, stay on after Questions to hear him.
Geoffrey’s speech was a powerful Commons performance — the most powerful of his career. If it failed in its ostensible purpose of explaining the policy differences that had provoked his resignation, it succeeded in its real purpose which was to damage me. It was cool, forensic, light at points, and poisonous. His long suppressed rancour gave Geoffrey’s words more force than he had ever managed before. He turned the cricketing metaphor against me with a QC’s skill, claiming that my earlier remarks about the hard ecu undermined the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ He persuasively caricatured my arguments of principle against Europe’s drift to federalism as mere tics of temperamental obstinacy. And his final line — ‘the time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long’ — was an open invitation to Michael Heseltine to stand against me that electrified the House of Commons.
It was a peculiar experience listening to this bill of particulars, rather like being the accused during a prosecutor’s summing up in a capital case. For I was as much the focus of attention as was Geoffrey. If the world was listening to him, it was watching me. And underneath the mask of composure, my emotions were turbulent. I had not the slightest doubt that the speech was deeply damaging to me. One part of my mind was making the usual political calculations of how I and my colleagues should react to it in the lobbies. Michael Heseltine had been handed more than an invitation to enter the lists; he had been given a weapon as well. How would we blunt it?
At a deeper level than calculation, however, I was hurt and shocked. Perhaps in view of the