ABSTRACT
AT THE HEIGHT of the Westland crisis in 1986, Michael Heseltine stormed out of the Cabinet. ‘It had been a pleasure to work with Mrs Thatcher’, he told the waiting journalists, ‘while in cabinet she had been first among equals.’ Now she had become an autocrat, and cabinet responsibility did not function. Convinced about Westland, and knowing that bureaucracy and the mass party had long given even the most incompetent premier a privileged position, Heseltine still grabbed at the title of Jeffrey Archer’s Westminster soap-opera, published in 1984 and by 1986 selling its millions in paperback and being serialized on television. Twenty years earlier, when politicians wanted to make a literary point, they would quote from Trollope or Disraeli, sources which suggested the mahogany conventions of Westminster and Whitehall. Now the dynamism of a prime minister to whom convention was alien was being fought with the aid of a quick dive into the supermarket dump-bucket.
