Mrs. Thatcher v. Europhiles.

resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher's deputy prime minister, was not in itself a crisis. But it triggered one. Like a minor seismic shock it exposed incipient cracks: and the possibility of a mighty earthquake in the political powerhouse immediately brought both the ambitious and timorous scurrying into view.

The main challenger to Mrs. Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, who resigned three years ago from the cabinet, has been biding his time, waiting an opportunity to strike without incurring fatal charges of disloyalty. He still hesitated: but events acquired their own momentum, confronting him with a fearful choice. If he failed to run against her openly now, when so many of his supporters and her enemies were urging him on, he would appear indecisive, weak, even a laughing stock; the moment might pass irrevocably. But to challenge her unsuccessfully might also be the end of his carefully nurtured hopes. And suppose he won, suppose that he replaced Mrs. Thatcher in Downing Street-and then suppose the Conservatives lost the next election and he was blamed for splitting the party at a critical stage; in that case, his would be a very transitory moment of glory. It's easy to see why he waited as long as possible to make up his mind.

The last two weeks have not shown British politics or the Conservative Party at their best. If one were a British soldier in the Gulf, waiting very possibly to go into action within the next few days or weeks-as the former lord chancellor, Lord Hailsham, has said-one would not be best pleased to think that the country's political leadership was being distracted in this way. Of course, it is true, as some Conservative politicians in the antiThatcher camp have responded, that Britain changed prime ministers during both world wars. But, in these instances, the war itself was the cause of the change. Now, although ostensibly the dispute may have started over policy towards Europe, no one seriously denies that the challenge to Mrs. Thatcher is heavily personal or personal-political; it's about election winning, and the fear of losing seats, and the hope of grasping power.

Mrs. Thatcher's enemies, both in the Conservative Party and in the opposition parties, are naturally making the most of her embarrassment. "She's finished" was the private comment of one very senior establishment figure. "This is a mortal blow to Mrs. Thatcher's government," gloated Paddy Ashdown, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, of Sir Geoffrey's resignation.

Sir Geoffrey, who had earlier been chancellor of the exchequer and foreign secretary, resigned almost exactly a year after the even more dramatic resignation of his successor at the treasury, Nigel Lawson. At the foreign office, he "went native" (or so Mrs. Thatcher believed), adopting the soft attitudes and emollient speech of that notoriously appeasement-minded institution. He negotiated the surrender of Hong Kong and proved a warm advocate of Britain's absorption into Europe. But his period as chancellor of the exchequer when Mrs. Thatcher first came to power is recalled with admiration. A relatively strict monetarist, he reduced a 20 per cent rate of inflation to 3 per cent, and he shocked all advocates of a controlled economy by completely abolishing exchange controls. When he left the treasury, his civil servants gave him, as a souvenir, a framed chart showing how all a the economic indicators had simultaneously come right.

Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe were once friends and owed each other a great deal. But recently, they could scarcely bear to sit at the same table. The reason he gave for resigning was not the substance of what she had said about Europe, but the mood and tone in which she said it.

The small cabinet reshuffle which followed was, in some ways, quite expedient: but it has done nothing to strengthen Mrs. Thatcher's hand, and the picture of a divided government, a divided party, is electorally harmful.

The European issue divides the Conservative Party, just as it divides the country. Mrs. Thatcher, who believes in a Europe of separate member states, cooperating and trading freely together, with minimal loss of sovereignty, has been pushed by Conservative Europhiles, by the foreign office, not least by Geoffrey Howe, into accepting one stage after another on a road that logically ends in monetary, social, and political union.

At the Rome meeting that led to Geoffrey Howe's resignation, the dominant European partners-France and Germany, with the connivance of Italy -used grandiloquent projections of unity as a diversionary cover for their refusal to moderate much further the protectionist agricultural policy which has always been, for them, an essential feature of the Common Market. Prime Minister Thatcher said so, vigorously. No one in Britain disagreed, but the Europhiles were appalled by the vehemence of her language and her uncompromising hostility toward even the ultimate goal of federal unity. They believe in going along with the European impetus and arguing "from within" against uncongenial developments.

(Before Mrs. Thatcher succeeded in reducing the power of the trade unions, the same reasoning was used to persuade Conservatives to join a union. They could influence union policy from within. In fact, of course, they had no influence and simply found themselves tied by policies of which they disapproved.)

If the British people were asked, they would not vote now for further substantial losses of sovereignty. The Europhiles think such losses worthwhile. The Labor Party, originally opposed to the Common Market, has now adopted a pro-European stance, partly to deride Mrs. Thatcher and partly because Europe has been developing along corporatist lines. Beneath this superficial conversion, however, Labor probably contains more hard-line anti-Europeans than the Conservatives.

A good case can be made for saying that Britain's currency and economy would be safer put under the thumb of German bankers with their rooted abhorrence of inflation. But no British politician has advanced those arguments candidly: and the British public's attitude was manifested again, the other day, by a flurry of jokes about the first whiffs of garlic emerging from the generally unwanted Channel Tunnel.

Mrs. Thatcher's instincts are, as usual, more coherent and populist than the policies with which she has been, through compromise, associated. She claims to be "a good European" and she solicited fanfares over the Tunnel: but the language of which the Europhiles complain was a more accurate reflection of her feelings.

Inevitably her government appears muddled. She has been urged by the media and by Michael Heseltine to let cabinet decisions evolve more collectively. She must have a sense of being beleaguered. Many of the advisors she really trusted have gone. MPs Airey Neave and Ian Gow were killed by the IRA. The free-market economist Alan Walters she was forced to let go during the dispute with Nigel Lawson. Nicholas Ridley had to resign in July after making anti-German remarks to The Spectator magazine. Norman Tebbit, a former party chairman whose wife was badly injured in the Brighton Hotel bombing, chose to retire from front-line politics. There is a "No Turning Back Group" of Thatcherite MPs, but, as the name suggests, they are fighting a defensive action. Meanwhile, the polls show a huge Labor lead and two recent by-elections were heavily lost.

This may be one of the darkest, most depressing, moments of her premiership, but her characteristic response to trouble is that of Marshal Foch: "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack." We shall see if this strategy works again as it has done so many times in the last 11 years.