UK industry was decimated by a decade of closures. Northern cities were wastelands of shut-down, boarded-up shops. A homophobic new law called Section 28 barred teachers and local councils from even discussing LGBTQ matters. And a poll tax had just been introduced, road-tested in Scotland first, which charged everyone the same fee for local government services no matter their income. Riots in the center of London were the response.
All this was the legacy of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990, her eleventh year in power. None of it is mentioned in the latest season of The Crown — which, to its credit, features Gillian Anderson absolutely nailing the ghastly political personality Thatcher had constructed for herself. (Yes, constructed: Thatcher hired a voice coach to give her that deep authoritarian boom, wiping over the light, lyrical Lincolnshire accent of her youth.)
The Crown devotes its season finale to Thatcher’s downfall, which took place 30 years ago this month. But here, too, the show barely scratches the surface of the Conservative Party leadership contest that brought her down. Not just because the poll tax is never mentioned (Thatcher’s Conservatives were up to 20 points behind the opposition Labour party in polls after it was introduced, giving the quest to replace her extra urgency).
We’re also given no hint of the larger, wilder story behind the leadership contest. It’s a tragedy of revenge and hubris worthy of Shakespeare; one that can be traced all the way back to the time Thatcher stuck a knife in her own predecessor’s back.
How it began
Thatcher in 1975, the year she became Conservative leader, with Michael Heseltine, the rival who would bring her down in 1990.
Image: Wesley / Keystone / Getty Images
For Thatcher, 1975 was a busy year. She was fighting off the nickname of “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher” for her just-ended time in government as education secretary, when she ended a popular program of free milk for schoolchildren. She campaigned successfully for the “yes” vote in the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European community (ironically, given her later anti-Europe stance). And she decided to run in the annual Conservative leadership election, against Ted Heath. (Crown viewers know Heath as the piano-playing bachelor Prime Minister who ran into trouble with the miners in Season 3.)
Thatcher’s political mentor Keith Joseph had been expected to run against Heath, who was vulnerable after losing two elections to Labour in 1974. But Joseph, facing a backlash over comments about how poor people should have fewer children, took his hat out of the ring. Thatcher’s surprise campaign was aided by a new party rule, which required Heath to have 15 percent more votes from Conservative members of Parliament than all rivals to avoid a second ballot. It was this same rule that would prevent her from winning the 1990 contest outright on the first ballot, by just four votes.
Two other pieces of the 1990 endgame were already in play. Geoffrey Howe, whose blistering anti-Thatcher resignation speech opens the Crown season finale, ran against Thatcher in the 1975 contest. And she had already butted heads with Michael Heseltine, a pro-Europe Conservative who was instrumental in founding the European Space Agency in 1973. Heseltine also tried to unite Britain’s space spending under a single authority. One cabinet minister refused to give up her portion of power over the program: Margaret Thatcher.
Tarzan returns
Heseltine was a colorful figure, in government and out. He was known as “Tarzan” for his wild mane of hair and resemblance to Tarzan movie actor Johnny Weissmuller. In 1975, Heseltine grew angry when the Labour government won a close vote and its MPs started singing the socialist anthem The Red Flag. Heseltine picked up the Mace, a symbol of the Queen’s authority in Parliament, which members are forbidden to touch. Depending on who tells the story, he either brandished it at the Labour benches or mockingly offered it to them. Either way, the “Mace incident” would never be forgotten.
In government as Defense secretary under Margaret Thatcher after her victory in 1979, Heseltine continued to grab headlines. He donned a military camouflage jacket and went to Greenham Common, a Royal Air Force base that stored nuclear weapons, which had been surrounded by anti-nuclear campaigners. Heseltine was caught in a melee with the protesters, making them look violent and handing Tarzan a PR victory. He wore the jacket as a badge of pride afterwards.
And then in 1986, Heseltine resigned dramatically over helicopters. He wanted Westland, Britain’s last helicopter manufacturer, to be sold to a European company; Thatcher, an acolyte of Ronald Reagan, preferred to sell it to an American company. The Westland affair was one of those old-school scandals that turned on tiny details about who had lied to whom about key meetings. But the upshot was clear: Two titanic Conservative egos had just clashed over which continent the struggling country should bind itself to in the future.
The pro-Europe champion went into the wilderness to bide his time and plot his revenge.
The dead sheep claps back
Geoffrey Howe, left, at a European election event a few months before he would resign from Margaret Thatcher’s government over Europe.
Image: David Giles / PA Images via Getty Images
Geoffrey Howe had by this time become a loyal footsoldier in the Thatcher government. He was so meek and mild-mannered that a Labour rival once described Howe’s attacks in Parliament as “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” But he too was pro-Europe. As Foreign Secretary (the British equivalent of Secretary of State), Howe favored joining something called the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which would link the exchange rate of all currencies in the European community.
In 1989, Howe helped nudge Thatcher into a public declaration of support for the ERM. She fired him in retaliation, trying to soften the blow with the purely ceremonial post of Deputy Prime Minister. After a famous speech in which Thatcher said “no, no, no” to the ERM, Howe resigned from that post too.
That’s the context for his blistering 1990 resignation speech, in which Howe complained that being in Thatcher’s government was like being on a cricket team whose “bats have been broken by the team captain.” Why cricket, though? It wasn’t just that Brits are nuts about the sport, upper-class Conservative types especially. It was that Thatcher herself had just given a speech boasting about her political prowess, using a bunch of cricketing metaphors.
It was a cricket clapback.
The Crown is correct in noting that Howe’s speech was the catalyst that led Heseltine to challenge Thatcher in the annual party leadership contest. But this wasn’t the first challenge she’d faced. An obscure Conservative MP named Anthony Meyer had run against her in 1989. Meyer was widely seen as a “stalking horse” who ran in the hopes that someone more famous like Heseltine would jump in. He didn’t, not that year, but it was clear that a decade of divisive economic policies had weakened Thatcher’s support in her Parliamentary party.
Howe’s speech, then, was the starting gun for a race that was years in the making. The Conservative Party had a habit of tearing itself apart and bringing down its leaders on the question of Europe, long before Brexit. Thatcher’s deep unpopularity in the country — her party never received more than 44 percent of the vote in the three elections she won, succeeding only because of third parties — was fuel on the fire.
Further irony can be found in the fact that Thatcher was in Europe, at a summit in Paris, when the first round of the leadership election was announced on November 20, 1990. In The Crown, she huddles with her advisers and starts drinking. In reality, she came striding out of the building during a live BBC broadcast to make a defiant statement. Her press chief Bernard Ingham, a rough type whose biography could fill a movie on its own, brushed the BBC reporter aside in a famous clip remembered years later.
Thatcher had come within a handful of votes of beating Heseltine outright, but she was hobbled by that 1975 rule requiring a 15 percent lead. On Nov. 21, 1990, back in London, having vowed to “fight on and fight to win,” Thatcher sounded out her cabinet ministers one by one. All told her that they supported her, but that she probably couldn’t beat Heseltine on a second ballot. If she withdrew now, a Thatcher-friendly replacement — such as the up-and-coming Chancellor, John Major — might have a chance against Tarzan.
Thatcher slept on it, then withdrew from the contest the next day. Years later, supporters suggested that if she’d seen her cabinet all at once, none would have dared suggest she withdraw. Still, she put in a star turn in Parliament that afternoon, beating back a vote of no confidence from the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. And in the long run, she got what she wanted — a Thatcher-friendly successor.
The ‘House of Cards’ connection
The rarest of photos: Margaret Thatcher in tears as she leaves Downing Street on Nov. 28, 1990.
Image: Neville Marriner / Daily Mail / Shutterstock
John Major, who is seen briefly in a non-speaking role sitting next to Thatcher in Parliament in The Crown, beat Heseltine in the second round of the leadership contest and became the next Prime Minister. He too didn’t win outright, but the momentum was clear, and Tarzan withdrew before inevitable defeat in a third round.
Major was as mild-mannered as Howe — the main adjective still used to describe him is “gray” — but also something of a machiavellian figure. The week of the leadership contest, Major was able to avoid all questions about his ambitions. Whether by coincidence or design, he had scheduled dental surgery that took him out of the media eye. He won a surprise general election victory against Kinnock in 1992, took Britain out of the ERM while causing a major economic crisis later that year, and was defeated in a landslide by Tony Blair in 1997.
By then, the ouster of Margaret Thatcher had become the stuff of legend. Her resignation was one of the most remarkable moments in British political history. Few could forget the feeling of surprise; Thatcher had won so often she seemed unbeatable. Joy had permeated the land, especially in the pubs of those broken northern cities. Few also could forget the way she left Downing Street in an uncharacteristic emotional display. “Mrs. T-ears,” read the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper the following day.
But the wildest memory of Thatcher’s resignation, for a young Brit like me, was the foreshadowing the weekend before it happened. On Nov. 18, 1990, households across the UK settled down to the first episode of a new political drama based on a 1989 novel by Conservative MP Michael Dobbs. Its name: House of Cards. (Years later, the UK show would inspire a U.S. version on Netflix, the success of which helped Netflix give the green light to production of The Crown…which brings us full circle.)
In the very first scene, fictional Conservative MP Francis Urquhart is at his desk looking at a framed photo of Margaret Thatcher. “Nothing lasts forever,” he says, turning the frame over and revealing that Thatcher has just resigned in the House of Cards universe. Did Dobbs’ colleagues watch that and decide that the time was ripe for reality to imitate art? Did it nudge just four MPs to vote against her, denying her a clear majority?
As Urquhart himself would say with a smile: “You might very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”