POLITICS

Why she never asked (and why he never told her)

FERDINAND MOUNT

When going over a script, the late Alfred Hitchcock would often ask 'what's happened to the McGuffin?' By this he meant the device that was supposed to set the whole plot in motion, something which in itself might be quite trivial or irrelevant but which was needed to propel the film through all the chases and doubletakes and scary bits and which must never be quite lost sight of or the whole enterprise would begin to sag. The trouble with the West- land script is that it has never stuck to the same McGuffin. To start with, Mr Hesel- tine told us that it was a constitutional crisis, but, as Michael Foot pointed out in a delightful speech on Monday, 'he seems to have got over that pretty quickly'. Next, the question was who was telling the truth — Mr Brittan or Sir Raymond Lygo. That was patched up. Then it was 'who leaked the Solicitor-General's letter?' The answer to that was given, and the answer resigned. So by the time the House of Commons was packed to the rafters on Monday after- noon, we were down to 'when did the Prime Minister know about the leak?' 'how much did she know?' and/or 'why on earth did she wait 16 days to find out the whole truth?' — all of which could be made to sound tolerably Watergate-ish but which had, I think, strayed a little too far from the original McGuffin.

Still, no credit should be taken away from Mr John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, who laid on a magnificent show, worthy not so much of Hitchcock as of Busby Berkeley. He had a huge, well-drilled cast of Tory MPs who chattered and giggled the whole way through the opening speech from Mr Kinnock (not quite as bad as it was reported, though certainly sub- standard). Mrs Thatcher was both stentor- an and apologetic, not an easy combina- tion. But the real coup de theatre was Mr Heseltine's apology: no revelations, no accusations, just a dear little recognition of shared human frailty. By the end of the debate, in fact, we were knee deep in recognitions of human frailty.

All the same, you have to spare a thought for the dedicated scandal buff. Just as he has accumulated his expertise about the Real Questions — it's not the meeting of the seventh that matters, it's the discre- pancy between the letter of the seventh and the meeting of the 21st when Haldeman told Mandy Rice-Davies that the Belgrano was heading north-north-west at the time — suddenly the steam goes out of the affair, and he is trampled underfoot by 400 Tory MPs singing 'Land of Hope and Glory'. And to have the instigator of the whole business saying he's extremely sorry and tremendously humble really is a bit much. It is rather as if, at the moment halfway through the car chase when the two cars are roaring along the Corniche side by side at 100 mph, the villain were to lean over and shout to James Stewart: 'I'm awfully sorry if you've got the wrong impression, but I was really only testing the acceleration.'

For that reason if for no other, the responsible political correspondent should resist the temptation to say 'well, any fool can see she's made the most frightful horlicks of the whole piffling business and she's lucky to get away with it. I think if we try the upstairs bar now, we should get a few in before the rush.' There are ques- tions to be answered, and we must straight- en up and answer them.

Is it credible that for 16 days Mrs Thatcher never asked her officials point blank — to use Dr David Owen's phrase -- whether Mr Brittan was involved? Is it credible that she never asked Mr Brittan himself? Is it credible that Mr Brittan never came and told her off his own bat?

If one goes on gasping out these ques- tions with a sharp intake of breath at each repetition, one develops a kind of asthma of incredulity. Thought and imagination alike tend to grind to a halt. Nothing seems to have any explanation.

But suppose we approach the business more like Alfred Hitchcock or, better still, like Hercule Poirot: employ the little grey cells and assume that there must be an explanation which, however bizarre or discreditable, is at least logical. Let us daringly start by assuming that virtually every word Mrs Thatcher uttered in her two statements was the literal truth, although not necessarily the whole truth.

She hears of the leak 'some hours' after it has occurred, like the rest of the nation (or those who bother to keep abreast of this increasingly complicated saga). She assumes, like the rest of the nation again, that the leak must have come from the Department of Trade and Industry and at a fairly senior level, since it was instan- taneous. Conversation 'in general terms' with Mr Ingham and Mr Powell the next morning, Tuesday, confirms this impress- ion. And there she leaves the matter. She asks no more questions. On Friday, Sir Robert Armstrong requests an enquiry. She agrees, but says nothing to him about her knowledge, fragmentary and vague as it may be. Why? Why does this energetic Prime Minister, dedicated to the pursuit of efficiency, fascinated by detail, not ask the question?

Because, mon ami, she does not wish to hear the answer. If she hauls Mr Brittan in and asks him the question point blank, he would have to say that he authorised the leak, and she would have to sack him. Well, would that not be the right thing to do, both to restore the good name of the Government and to ensure its survival? After all, it will all have to come out soon enough. The morning after, she has been told that the law officers are hopping mad. Sir Robert is bound to be forced to set up a leak enquiry. Why not take the initiative and act before she is forced to?

Why Mr Brittan never told her of his direct responsibility for the leak is a much simpler matter. Because he thought she already knew, or at any rate knew enough to summon him for a talk if she wanted to. In ordinary life, one does not burst in to the Employer to say: 'Oh by the way, Prime Minister, just in case you have forgotten, I'm the one who did it.' There is, after all, always the chance that the Awful Thing will go away. But why does she not haul him in?

Well, she does not want to lose Mr Brittan for several reasons — because she is fond of him, because he has supported her steadfastly throughout the whole West- land trauma, because he is, however clumsily, attempting to carry out her in- structions to counter-attack against Mr Heseltine's letter to Mr Horne of Lloyds Merchant Bank — since that letter is a clear breach of collective Cabinet responsi- bility. She is reluctant to discard Mr Brittan at a stroke like that. Losing two ministers does look like carelessness.

Yet there is more to it than complicity and affection. And here I must bring in a piece of 'constitutional practice' which I think I have discovered — or rather re- discovered. At least, I have seen it referred to nowhere else.

Over the last 30 years, the circumstances in which ministers have resigned from the Cabinet have fallen roughly into three categories: either they have gone of their own free will because they are furious, bored or ill (George Brown, Heseltine, Prior, etc); or they have gone on grounds of inefficiency or age, as part of a recon- struction of the government (dozens of them); or they have been forced out after a prolonged campaign against their conduct in press and/or Parliament — Maudling, Parkinson, etc. The last occasion I can think of when the Prime Minister sacked a minister on the spot for a specific action was Attlee's 1947 sacking of Dalton for a Budget leak. That seemd a bit harsh even at the time, I think, and seems harsher in retrospect. Since then, Prime Ministers do seem to have felt the need to wait and gather some extra collective authority be- fore getting rid of a colleague — either the pressure of a public hue and cry, or the imperative to reconstruct the government as a whole in order to improve its perform- ance. Ex-Prime Ministers like to say 'of course, I'd have had him out of my Cabinet In five minutes' — but in practice they did not do it like that. Ministers do not get sacked quite like ordinary mortals. They are forced out by public outcry or reshuf- fled out. There is a difference, even if the discards may feel it comes to much the same thing. Propriety these days demands a period of reflection and a show of reluctance from the Prime Minister before disposing of a minister who has sinned or blundered. Thus she would not have found it easy either to sack Mr Heseltine as soon as he began to breach collective responsi- bility or to sack Mr Brittan until thepress and Tory MPs had demanded it. Suppose then that this is the explana- tion. She could not ask the question because, instinctively if not consciously, she knew she did not want to hear the answer, since the answer would have forced her to sack Mr Brittan on the spot — which would have not merely looked like disloyalty to her most loyal supporter but would have been against the modern constitutional fashion. Prime Ministers have to know when not to ask questions as well as when to ask them. Where she went wrong was surely much earlier on. I don't mean in putting up Mr Brittan to wheel on the Solicitor-General to give his view. That, after all, is what the law officers are there for, and very often their views turn out to be more illuminating or secure than Sir Patrick Mayhew's were. Her disastrous error lay in succumbing to the whole Westland hysteria in the first place, in joining the pursuit of the McGuffin, and so getting caught up in the hectic chase.

From now on, we are told, things are going to be very different.

Jolly Senior Ex-Minister (before the debate) to Junior Minister: 'Of course, all this means we're absolutely bound to win the next election.'

Junior Minister: 'Oh really. How so exactly?'

Jolly Senior Ex-Minister: 'Well, either she mends her ways and opts for consensus and collective responsibility, or she goes, and we get a consensus-minded leader. Either way, we can't lose.'

Many Tory MPs, weary of the hectic ride, are longing for the quiet life. They want an end to all this radical, dynamic stuff. Indeed, 'collective responsibility' is a code word for precisely that. If the Cabinet is not pretty hard driven, if the ideal of collective responsibility is allowed to flour- ish, then nothing contentious ever gets past it. The blockers gain in confidence and begin to obstruct even the most modest suggestions. It is a process which is most likely to occur in the second half of a parliament, fertilised by fatigue. If there is a legacy of this whole peculiar, occasional- ly enjoyable, sometime ludicrous but most- ly babyish saga, this is it.

Yet in practice, I suspect that 'the return of Cabinet government' and Mrs Thatch- er's 'impaired authority' will amount to rather less than some fear and others hope. She has lost dozens of arguments in Cabinet before, and will lose dozens more.

Many of the fiercest policy disagreements of her earlier years no longer apply. The niceties of Cabinet procedure may be more carefully observed in future. But Prime Ministers in good health with large majori- ties do tend to go on acting like Prime Ministers until they are thrown out which is usually done by the voters, and not by their colleagues.