In an extract from The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, edited by Francis Beckett, Peter Cuthbertson imagines what would have happened if Norman Tebbit had succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister...
It is unlikely the Tebbit years could have happened without the intervention of Frank Field, the Labour MP whose curious relationship with Margaret Thatcher gave him real influence, and Charles Powell, her foreign policy adviser. As Thatcher approached the close of her tenth year as Prime Minister, both advised her independently to stand down. With an overheating economy and three spectacular election victories, she would end on an unprecedented high note. Most of all, by leaving now, she had the best chance of ensuring her favoured successor.
Thatcher’s choice was her popular lieutenant Norman Tebbit. A critic of Edward Heath before Thatcher, Tebbit made a name for himself in her government. A former union official himself, he had already played a key role in trade union reform, was outspoken against sympathising with rioters and had helped deliver a landslide election victory in 1987. Thatcher also saw in Tebbit a reflection of her own talent for connecting unmistakeably right-wing policies to the aspirations of working-class and lower middle-class floating voters who decided elections.
...
In putting together his Cabinet, Tebbit reluctantly decided that the same individuals should be kept in the three great offices of state – so long as they acknowledged the verdict of the leadership election. But Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe both declined to serve under a Prime Minister who had just been elected in opposition to the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and who made clear that under him the pound also would no longer be shadowing the value of the Deutschmark. Howe in particular explained that he viewed the ERM, and eventual entry into a single European currency, as essential to Britain’s economic and foreign policy. And so a slightly relieved Tebbit decided that the key economic portfolios would be reserved for those who shared his opposition to the ERM. Nicholas Ridley, previously Environment Secretary, was made Chancellor. John Redwood was appointed to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. But Tebbit was determined to incorporate all wings of the Conservative Party in the Cabinet. Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, was appointed as the new Foreign Secretary and replaced at the Home Office by Kenneth Clarke. Michael Heseltine accepted the role of Environment Secretary, and set about dismantling the Community Charge.
...
The economy was the greatest initial challenge for the new government. Nicholas Ridley’s predecessor, in an effort to prevent the pound rising against the Deutschmark, had been increasing the money supply substantially. The resultant inflation had reached 8.3 per cent by June 1989, and interest rates had already risen to 14 per cent in an effort to slow down the economy. The end of the policy of shadowing the Deutschmark halted any further rise in inflation. Interest rates remained high for the next twelve months and economic growth was choked. The economy briefly dipped into a quickly forgotten recession in 1990, but by the time Tebbit celebrated his first year in Downing Street, inflation was back to the levels of the mid-1980s and interest rates were permitted to fall.
...
It fell to Tebbit’s two successors to secure peace in Northern Ireland, but military historians agree that the early 1990s were most significant in beginning the long peace process. After Tebbit became Prime Minister, the death toll on the Republican side began to rise, and no major bombs were exploded on the British mainland until the following year.
It was on a rainy Monday – 8 January 1990 – that the Army Council of the IRA met in a private home on a quiet street in Dundalk, just south of the Irish Republic’s border with Ulster. This council included Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the two most prominent Sinn Fein leaders of the era, and five leading IRA paramilitaries. Neighbours gave the only eyewitness accounts, in which the sound of sub-machine gun fire began at around 8.20 p.m. and less than ten minutes later at least a dozen men, all in black, disappeared in the direction of a nearby field. Adams, one of the world’s best-known terrorist leaders of the 1980s, had been shot eighteen times. The only surviving member of the IRA Army Council was Freddie Scappaticci, whose survival was unexplained at the time, but who was eventually unmasked as a British agent.
The Prime Minister gave a statement detailing the many killings for which the IRA’s Army Council had been responsible and welcoming the ‘opportunity for peace that may now follow its surprising demise’. The Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, issued no immediate statement, but was forced to act when one of his frontbenchers, Harriet Harman, argued that this ‘atrocity’ had made Gerry Adams a ‘martyr’. Kinnock separated her from her shadow Cabinet portfolio position within hours and a hitherto promising career was ended.
...
Almost immediately after the November 1991 general election, which Tebbit won with a majority of seventy-four, the Conservatives faced the greatest crisis of Tebbit’s premiership as the European Community pushed ahead in a far more federalist direction. The negotiations for the Treaty of Maastricht began just one month after Tebbit’s election success. The Treaty meant a single currency, a Common Foreign and Security Policy and a Social Charter aimed at curbing the ability of member states to deregulate their labour markets. The consensus on the continent was strongly in favour of moves towards a European Union. Within the government, arguments raged fiercely. The Foreign Secretary, supported by the Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine, urged that while the government should aim to influence its content, Britain must sign whatever Treaty emerged. The Prime Minister and Chancellor argued that Britain could retain the benefits of EC membership without taking any further steps towards federalism.
...
Speaking in the House of Lords in January 1992, Lady Thatcher declared her opposition to any government that signed a Maastricht Treaty along the lines detailed the previous month. At Prime Minister’s Questions the same day, Tebbit was challenged by the Labour leader John Smith to disassociate himself from Thatcher’s comments. Instead the Prime Minister endorsed them.
Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine resigned from the government the same day. They and fourteen other Tory backbenchers – instantly dubbed the ‘Maastricht rebels’ – began their campaign for the Treaty of Maastricht. Labour and Liberal Democrats MPs were almost unanimous in support. But Tebbit, having just won the Conservatives a fourth general election with a big working majority, retained the confidence of his party and the House of Commons. Despite the passionate efforts of the Maastricht rebels, the Treaty never went before the floor of the House of Commons. The European Community began its steps towards federalism without the continent’s best performing economy. Within a decade, nearly all of the other members shared a currency and a central bank. In return for Britain’s acquiescence to the emergence of a quasifederal Europe, the other member states agreed to Britain beginning moves towards bilateral free trade agreements with North America, South America and large parts of Asia.