ABSTRACT
During her long prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher’s political demise was frequently prophesied and, by her many critics, eagerly awaited. It was widely felt that she could not survive the desperate economic depression of 1980-1, for which her government’s economic management was directly responsible. Many in her own party hoped that she would not. Her recovery after the Falklands campaign and her substantial election victory in 1983 silenced Tory doubters for a while. However, it is reasonable to date the background to her eventual fall not to 1990 but to 1986, the year of the Westland affair and the consequential resignation of Michael Heseltine. Westland was, in one sense, a political storm in a teacup. The finan-
cial difficulties of an ailing west of England helicopter company would not normally be the stuff of Cabinet crisis. However, they were portents of something much bigger. Westland gave an early indication of the deep divisions within the Conservative Party over Europe and it was not coincidental that it was eventually the challenge to her leadership of the strongly pro-European Michael Heseltine that brought the prime minister down. Westland is also a useful place to begin because it was the first occasion on which she thought herself vulnerable to a party coup against her. She later confided in her memoirs that, at the height of the crisis, ‘I was considering my own position’, knowing perfectly well that ‘there were those in my own Party and Government who would like to take the opportunity of getting rid of me’.1
