The house of Commons was witness yesterday to a performance without precedent in the annals of metallurgy: an iron lady, brazening it out.
The spirit which finished the Argies still flickered from time to time, but there was precious little ammunition to go with it.
At first, as her weird tale unfolded, the House seemed united in disbelief. What, a week ago, had apparently been a deplorable leak which the Government was vigorously pursuing with all the traditional resources, was now suddenly revealed as an act of the highest public spirit, authorised by her own Secretary of State, and endorsed by her own private office ╤ ╥as a matter of duty╙, no less.
The Opposition parties, rocking with mirth and rapture, couldn╒t believe their luck. Yet even more overwhelming than their celebration was the silent dismay and bewilderment gripping much of the Government benches.
The stain of this day, Neil Kinnock told them, would stay with the lady for the rest of her parliamentary life. And the lack of protest told you how many on the other side feared that it might be true.
Mrs Thatcher, in her spunky way, returned again and again to a single, central point. Had the Solicitor-General╒s qualms not been advertised when they were, Westland shareholders might have reached their decisions in fatal misapprehension. Gradually, some of her senior loyalists took up the theme. What would the House have said, asked the 1922 Committee chairman, Cranley Onslow, if the Government had done nothing to stop the shareholders being misled?
Some backbench colleagues, reminded of their duty, gave that a decorous cheer. Others tried to rally their comrades by discouraging the Opposition╒s motives. ╥A farrago of hypocrisy and cant,╙ Norman St John-Stevas called their case ╤ making it clear he thought things could have been handled better.
But the tide was running against them. Only those Tories who hammered Michael Heseltine for setting the whole disaster in motion got any really spontaneous response from the ranks around them.
And, time and again, the Opposition came back to the questions the Prime Minister couldn╒t or wouldn╒t answer. Why had she set up an inquiry, when everyone had known the truth all along? And if it was true that much of what the inquiry revealed had been unknown to her until she received it ╤ then why had nobody told her?
To David Steel the inquiry was ╥a nine-day charade╙ which in the outside world would have laid Mrs Thatcher open to a charge of wasting police time. If he╒d set up such an inquiry while Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees told her, and someone had come to him and said: ╥But sir, you authorised it╙ ╤ he╒d have resigned. In the end it was Peter Hordern, Conservative Member for Horsham, who best caught the mood of his side: a profound longing for this whole ordeal to be over. Did the fate of this small company, he asked, really merit all this fuss? Wasn╒t it time they got on with some proper business?
And if some who sat on the packed Tory benches through this deeply humiliating hour no longer sit there after the next election, they may well look back to the events of this day and ask themselves if this was the moment when their fate was sealed.
