Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster

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       The Foreign Secretary Who Never Was

      In May 1983, two weeks before the general election, I wrote a Times splash suggesting that Margaret Thatcher would dismiss Francis Pym, her foreign secretary, after the election and replace him with her party chairman and close friend Cecil Parkinson, who was about to oversee an election landslide.

      The story came as a result of a lunch with a senior Cabinet minister who knew Thatcher’s thinking. Jim Naughtie (then of The Guardian and later of the Today programme), Margaret van Hattem (of the Financial Times) and I had taken the minister to the sumptuous Ma Cuisine in Walton Street, Chelsea.

      Margaret, who was to die tragically young in 1989 from a brain haemorrhage, was a highly intelligent, attractive woman, with a mischievous, occasionally flirtatious, air.

      The minister – tall, debonair and unbelievably smooth – who joined us that day was completely taken with Margaret, whom he had not met before. Before long, as almost always on these occasions, we got on to the subject of the post-election Cabinet reshuffle, making sure that our guest’s glass of white wine was nicely topped up.

      The minister was putty in Margaret’s hands. Jim and I were virtual bystanders – although we were listening carefully and taking mental notes – as our friend took our guest through all the likely changes and he answered them all directly, almost as if he were privy to the Prime Minister’s thoughts. He was playing to the gallery – showing off – and the gallery was Margaret. Jim and I, meanwhile, were playing gooseberry.

      He was clear that Pym, by whom ‘Margaret’ – he was talking about Thatcher – was increasingly frustrated, was on his way out. And when our Margaret asked who would replace him, our man blushed and told her and us that he would have to leave that to our imagination. We knew what he meant and he appeared almost beside himself with excitement at the prospect of going to the Foreign Office. Thatcher, we were told, had in a way groomed him for the role by appointing him – at the time a relatively junior figure in the Cabinet hierarchy – to the War Cabinet set up for the Falklands conflict. By the time our guest had finished, we felt we had a pretty good idea of what the Cabinet would look like after the Conservatives’ certain victory.

      When he had left us, Jim and I congratulated Margaret on her charming interrogation techniques and talked about how we would write up the story. Ministers were never averse to such speculation, and the job of the reporter was to decide whether they were guessing or knew what they were talking about. This minister left us in little doubt that he knew what he was about. Our guest was, of course, Cecil Parkinson.

      When Thatcher won her landslide and carried out her reshuffle, Pym – probably the most infuriating of the ‘wets’ in the eyes of his boss – was indeed sacked and refused to take any other job, retiring in dignified fashion to the back-benches. But rather than going to the Foreign Office, Parkinson became secretary of state for trade and industry. Jim, Margaret and I decided philosophically that ‘you win some, you lose some’ and that we had at least got the story fifty per cent right. But it was not long before we were to learn why the second half of our story had not happened.

      As Margaret Thatcher was to confirm in her autobiography, she had indeed intended to appoint Parkinson as foreign secretary.

      He and I agreed on economic and domestic policy. Neither of us had the slightest doubt that Britain’s interests must come first in foreign policy. He had served in the Falklands war Cabinet. He had just masterminded the most technically proficient election campaign I have known. He seemed to me right for this most senior job.

      She did not say this, but Parkinson was also her kind of man – handsome and smooth, even if some found him oleaginous. She was the daughter of a grocer, he the son of a railway man. He was the grammar-school boy who went to Cambridge and was everything the more privileged members of her Cabinet were not, the charmer whom the Tory members loved.