Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 by Charles Moore

Author:Charles Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241201268
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

Heseltine should also be made to give his letter to the press since he had done the same with his letter to Horne, Powell added. He then got in touch directly with Mayhew and ‘told him’, as he himself put it, ‘what was expected of him’.98 It cannot have been welcome to Mayhew, who did not rush to respond, but he made no objection.

The following day, a Sunday, Mrs Thatcher met Whitelaw and Wakeham at Chequers for a discussion of how to deal with Heseltine. She told them that the Solicitor-General was likely to object to what appeared in Heseltine’s letter to Horne, though she did not say by what means. They agreed that Heseltine should be brought to order at the next Cabinet meeting on Thursday 9 January. She still did not want to sack him. ‘I don’t want to look petty,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt on the telephone that evening.99* She and her colleagues were not even trying to engineer his resignation – though they realized it was a strong possibility that he would resign and therefore designated the Scottish Secretary, George Younger, as his replacement if one were needed. They were trying to devise a way of forcing Heseltine into line.

In the late morning of Monday 6 January, the Solicitor-General sent his letter to Michael Heseltine, very late in the day if it was to fulfil its declared purpose of informing the Westland board in time for their meeting that afternoon. The previous day, Mayhew had telephoned Heseltine to warn him of this approach: in his dealings throughout the affair, he was friendlier to Heseltine than to Mrs Thatcher, so much so that he did little more than go through the motions in rebuking the Defence Secretary. Although it was cautious and friendly in tone, however, his letter did make the point which Powell had wanted about ‘material inaccuracies’ in the letter to Horne. Heseltine had been mistaken in saying, said Mayhew, that all the companies in the European bid had stated that a Westland link with Sikorsky would rule out Westland participation in a European battlefield helicopter. Two had; one (the Italians) hadn’t – hardly an earth-shattering point. Since the letter to Horne might be relied upon by the Westland board and shareholders in arriving at their decision, ‘I therefore advise you that you should write again to Mr Horne correcting these inaccuracies.’100 Passing this on to Mrs Thatcher, Charles Powell wrote on it: ‘Very satisfactory’. No one pretended that this letter offered a finely tuned piece of legal advice. Like the first, this second Mayhew letter had been transparently inspired by ministers in their war with one another. This time the conflict intensified further. As Leon Brittan recalled, ‘She and her entourage were extremely keen it be in the public domain.’101 In a breach of accepted practice, the Law Officer’s letter was leaked to the press. Colette Bowe, Brittan’s press officer,* did this by reading part of its contents over the telephone just after 2 p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.