The 1990 Conservative Party leadership election was called on 14 November 1990 following the decision of Michael Heseltine, former defence and environment secretary, to challenge Margaret Thatcher, the incumbent Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for leadership of the Conservative Party.
In the months leading up to the election, Thatcher's position was slipping due to her increasingly divisive and confrontational approach in the United Kingdom. Her Community Charge had proven to be highly unpopular and resulted in widespread riots across the country, while her Euroscepticism had begun to become a detriment to the Conservatives. The economy, which was booming, had started to enter the early stages of a recession due to high inflation. The tipping point came in October when Thatcher strongly refused the European Economic Community's plans for further integration, prompting her longest serving minister Geoffrey Howe to resign. Immediately following his resignation, Heseltine challenged Thatcher to a contest in November.
Thatcher failed to win outright on the first ballot, missing the threshold by just four votes, and was persuaded to withdraw from the second round of voting to avoid a potential defeat. She announced her pending resignation on 22 November 1990, ending more than fifteen years as Conservative leader on 27 November 1990 and eleven years as prime minister on 28 November 1990.
Background to the contest
Discontent with Margaret Thatcher's leadership of the Conservative Party had been growing over the latter years of her tenure, particularly following the Westland affair. There were differences within the Cabinet over Thatcher's perceived intransigence in her approach to the European Economic Community. In particular, many leading Conservatives wanted the United Kingdom to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), a move which Thatcher did not favour. In June 1989, the then-Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson forced Thatcher to agree to the "Madrid Conditions", namely that Britain would eventually join the ERM "when the time was right". In July 1989, Thatcher retaliated by removing Howe from the Foreign Office, while making him Deputy Prime Minister (in theory a promotion but in reality removing him from a key post).
Whereas Thatcher had presided over an economic boom at the time of her third general election victory in 1987, by the autumn of 1989 interest rates had to be raised to 15% to cool inflation, which was now pushing 10%. Rates would remain at that level until October 1990. Lawson, who had clashed with Thatcher over "shadowing the Deutsche Mark" early in 1988, resigned as Chancellor in October 1989, unable to accept Thatcher publicly taking independent advice from the economist Alan Walters. The beneficiary was John Major, little known to the public hitherto, who had briefly been promoted to succeed Howe as foreign secretary in July before succeeding Lawson as Chancellor in October, putting him in pole position to succeed Thatcher.
In December 1989, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership for the first time since her election to that position in 1975, by the little known 69-year-old backbench MP Sir Anthony Meyer. Thatcher faced no serious threat of losing to this stalking horse challenger, but her political credibility was undermined by the fact that 60 members of the parliamentary Conservative party had not supported her, 33 voting for Meyer, 24 spoiling their ballot papers, and three not voting at all. The non-voters were reported by the next day's Glasgow Herald to include Michael Heseltine, with the same newspaper ominously reporting that Heseltine's supporters predicted that unless the Prime Minister changed "her style of leadership", she would "be on her way out next year".
Throughout 1990, the popularity both of Thatcher and her Conservative government waned considerably. The introduction of the deeply unpopular Community Charge (which opponents branded the "poll tax") had been greeted with widespread opposition (one poll showed 78% opposed the scheme), including large-scale organised nonpayment and violent civil unrest. The opposition Labour Party had led in most of opinion polls since mid-1989, and at the height of the poll tax controversy, some indicated Labour support above 50%, a lead of more than twenty points over the Conservatives. Though the Conservatives still had a working majority of more than 100 seats, elections were due by the autumn of 1992 at the latest, which put a sense of relative urgency behind the efforts to force Thatcher out. Local elections in May brought another bruising loss, further undermining the government’s credibility and instilling a sense of electoral doom in many Conservatives. Moreover, by late 1990 the economy was in the first stages of recession; this, combined with lingering animosity over the poll tax issue and the fact that Labour was stubbornly holding on to its double-digit lead in the polls, made it clear to an increasing number of Conservative MPs (particularly the so-called wets, a group of moderates who were no friends of Thatcher to begin with) that the party was on course for a spectacular defeat in 1992 if the government did not radically change course.
On the international front, European leaders were discussing merging Europe's currencies to form a single currency, a move which the ever-Eurosceptic Thatcher did not favour, and in June Major suggested that this should be a "hard ECU", competing for use against existing national currencies; this idea was not in the end adopted. In October 1990, Major and the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, forced a reluctant Thatcher to agree to bring the UK into the exchange rate mechanism.
Howe's resignation triggers contest
By October things had reached a fever pitch. In her Party Conference Speech early in that month, Thatcher mocked the Liberal Democrats' new "bird" logo in language lifted from the famous Monty Python "Dead Parrot sketch". Only days later, the Liberal Democrats took a seat from the Conservatives at the Eastbourne by-election. The defeat only reinforced the fear that the Conservatives could lose the next election due in eighteen months. On 30 October, Thatcher spoke out firmly in the House of Commons against the vision of European integration, including a single currency, espoused by the European Commission under Jacques Delors at the recent Rome Summit, characterising it as the path to a federal Europe and declaring that her response to such a vision would be "No! No! No!" This led to the resignation of Howe as deputy prime minister on 1 November. However, Howe did not make his resignation speech immediately, because he had temporarily lost his voice.
Heseltine, a moderate and pro-EU former minister, had resigned from the Cabinet over the Westland affair in January 1986 and had been conducting himself as a sort of intra-party opposition leader, critical of Thatcher's leadership, ever since. He now wrote a six-page public letter to his local Association chairman, calling for more regard for the wide range of opinions in the party before leaving for a trip to the Middle East. His Association officers sent him a 97-word reply on 5 November saying that they supported Thatcher's leadership. The party's regional agent had been present at their meeting, although they insisted he had not interfered with their reply. At about the same time, Thatcher's press secretary Bernard Ingham briefed journalists that Heseltine had "lit the blue touch paper then retired", although he denied having demanded that Heseltine "put up (that is, challenge Thatcher for the leadership) or shut up"; Heseltine was also taunted along similar lines by right-wing press, including the Daily Mail and The Times. Thatcher brought the annual leadership election forward by a fortnight.
At the Lord Mayor's Banquet on 12 November, Thatcher dismissed Howe's resignation by employing a cricketing metaphor:
I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking the bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling's going to get hit all round the ground. That is my style.
The next day, 13 November, Howe made his resignation speech from the backbenches, addressing his dismay at Thatcher's approach and responding to her recent cricketing metaphor by employing one of his own. Explaining how, in his opinion, her approach made it hard for British ministers to negotiate for Britain's interests in Europe, he declared:
It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.
Howe's dramatic speech received cheers from the opposition benches and reinforced the change in general perception of Thatcher from the "Iron Lady" to a divisive and confrontational figure. The next morning, 14 November, Heseltine reappeared to announce that he would challenge her for the leadership of the party.
Contest rules
The rules for Conservative leadership elections had been introduced for the first such election in 1965, and modified in 1975, the occasion of Thatcher's own victory over the incumbent leader Edward Heath. There would be a series of ballots of Conservative MPs, conducted by the 1922 Committee, with that committee's chairman, Cranley Onslow, as Returning Officer.
To win in the first round, as Thatcher had done one year before, a candidate needed not just to win an absolute majority, but also to have a lead over the runner-up of 15% of the total electorate (not just those who actually voted, as had been the case until the 1975 review, but including those who abstained or spoiled their ballot papers). There were 372 Conservative MPs in November 1990 (taking into account by-election losses since 376 Conservative MPs had been elected in the June 1987 general election). Therefore, a majority of at least 56 votes was required.
If no candidate achieved a sufficient majority, nominations would be re-opened, so new candidates could come forward, and a second ballot would take place one week later, at which only an absolute majority would be required. If necessary, the top three candidates from the second round would then go forward to a third and final round held under the alternative vote system.
Many speculated that if Thatcher did not achieve outright victory in the first round, she would either be forced to step down (opening up the field to her supporters who had previously been prevented from standing by their personal loyalty) or else might suffer further challenges from heavyweight figures. Although Heseltine was a serious leadership contender in his own right, many saw him (correctly, as it turned out) as a "stalking horse" like Meyer in 1989, who might weaken Thatcher only to pave the way for victory by a new candidate in a later round.
First ballot
Heseltine was proposed by Neil Macfarlane (who had been a leading Thatcher backer in the 1975 contest) and Peter Tapsell. His campaign was run by Keith Hampson, Michael Mates and Peter Temple-Morris. He proposed a complete review of the poll tax but rejected Thatcher's proposal of a referendum on British membership of the mooted single European currency. Thatcher gave an interview to The Times in which she attacked his corporatist views, which made her appear extreme. Heseltine canvassed hard around Parliament whilst Thatcher was away at the Fontainebleau summit.
The first ballot in the election took place on Tuesday 20 November 1990. Thatcher herself was still in France on the night of the election and therefore voted by proxy, perhaps anticipating a better result than she actually achieved.
Although Thatcher had obtained a clear majority, she was four votes short of the required 15% margin, so the election had to move to a second ballot. Thatcher gave a short statement in Paris following the announcement of the result, declaring that she intended to contest the second ballot, and on her return to London the following morning declared, "I fight on; I fight to win".
After the first ballot result the Heseltine team boasted of momentum, which was tactically foolish in the view of his biographer Michael Crick. He argues that they should have encouraged Thatcher to remain in the contest by downplaying Heseltine's support, much as the then-challenger Thatcher and her campaign manager Airey Neave had done prior to the first ballot of the 1975 contest.