Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [534]
The speech which I then rose to deliver does not read in Hansard as a particularly eloquent one. It is a fighting defence of the Government’s record which replies point by point to the Opposition’s attack, and which owes more to the Conservative Research Department than to Burke. For me at that moment, however, each sentence was my testimony at the bar of History. It was as if I were speaking for the last time, rather than merely for the last time as Prime Minister. And that power of conviction came through and impressed itself on the House.
After the usual partisan banter with Opposition hecklers, I restated my convictions on Europe and reflected on the great changes which had taken place in the world since I had entered No. 10. I said:
Ten years ago, the eastern part of Europe lay under totalitarian rule, its people knowing neither rights nor liberties. Today, we have a Europe in which democracy, the rule of law and basic human rights are spreading ever more widely; where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end.
These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated. No one in eastern Europe believes that their countries would be free had it not been for those western governments who were prepared to defend liberty, and who kept alive their hope that one day eastern Europe too would enjoy freedom.
My final reflection was on the Falklands and Gulf Wars, the second of which we were just then gearing up to fight.
There is something else which one feels. That is a sense of this country’s destiny: the centuries of history and experience which ensure that, when principles have to be defended, when good has to be upheld and when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms. It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today.
Such was my defence of the record of the Government which I had headed for eleven and a half years, which I had led to victory in three elections, which had pioneered the new wave of economic freedom that was transforming countries from eastern Europe to Australasia, which had restored Britain’s reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the world, and which at the very moment when our historic victory in the Cold War was being ratified at the Paris conference had decided to dispense with my services. I sat down with the cheers of my colleagues, wets and dries, allies and opponents, stalwarts and fainthearts, ringing in my ears, and began to think of what I would do next.
BOWING OUT
But there was one more duty I had to perform, and that was to ensure that John Major was my successor. I wanted — perhaps I needed — to believe that he was the man to secure and safeguard my legacy and to take our policies forward. So it was with disquiet that I learnt a number of my friends were thinking of voting for Michael Heseltine. They distrusted the role which John Major’s supporters like Richard Ryder, Peter Lilley, Francis Maude and Norman Lamont had played in my downfall. They also felt that Michael Heseltine, for all his faults, was a heavyweight who could fill a room in the way a leader should. I did all I could to argue them out of this, not only in personal conversation but also at the lunch to which I invited my supporters on Monday. In most cases I was successful.
Before then, however, I was to spend my last weekend at Chequers. I arrived there on Saturday evening, travelling down after quite a jolly little lunch with the family and friends at No. 10. On Sunday morning Denis and I went to church, while Crawfie filled a Range Rover with hats, books and a huge variety of