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The blonde, blue-eyed former American Democrat with the Kennedy smile was seen at the time as a potential successor to Thatcher. But they did so by taking the only other action open to them – many simply ceased paying their bills.The June election brought John Moore to the Department of Health as Fowler’s replacement. Early in 1987, it became plain that a general election was likely and Norman Fowler, the Secretary of State, sent out the word to health authorities to “keep the lid on” Bed closures, managers were told, would not be welcome They complied. Slowly but surely, the level of debt the NHS carried had been rising.The NHS settlement for the financial year 1987-88 was, as usual, tight. A relatively small miscalculation in the NHS budget for that financial year had produced a massive financial crisis. Since 1982, health authorities had used two stratagems to cope with a growing efficiency squeeze on their budgets: they had closed beds towards the end of the financial year as the money ran out, and they had delayed paying bills to their suppliers.

But people like you and me should take responsibility for our own lives and insure for these things.”Or, in the words of Sir Roy Griffiths, her personal adviser on health management whose twin reports transformed NHS management and restructured community care, “she would have liked to have got away from it. If it hadn’t been there, she would never have invented it.”She had, it turned out, little choice. In the summer of 1981, a Central Policy Review Staff report on how to cut the future costs of the welfare state had leaked. Among the proposals had been the replacement of the NHS by private insurance. Reaction to the leak was so volcanic that at that year’s party conference it forced from the Prime Minister the pledge that the NHS “is safe with us” – famously misquoted as “safe in our hands”.By 1988, that no longer seemed so. “She was positively proud of the fact that she looked after her own health and made no claims on it …

she was quite happy that the vulnerable, the poor, should have the taxpayer do it for them. “She thought it disgraceful that people who could afford it relied on the taxpayer,” Kenneth Clarke recalls. It was, she believed, wonderful for car crashes, disasters and devastating illness: in her own words for the “great accidents” and “terrible diseases” But otherwise she believed people should pay for themselves. What followed was to be among the most turbulent couple of hours that Clarke and Thatcher spent together.Getting there had already been a rocky road Mrs Thatcher had no great love for the NHS. Their conclusion was that they would not.
In Clarke’s words, Mrs Thatcher “wanted to scrap the health reforms – put them off, postpone them until after the election – taking much longer over them and spending much more time on costing systems and management techniques”. Clarke and his colleagues had been called in for a Spanish inquisition. For in the previous weeks, Mrs Thatcher had dispatched around the NHS three of her most trusted advisers: Sir David Wolfson, the businessman from Great Universal Stores who had headed her political office from 1979 to 1985; Lord Rayner, the Marks & Spencer chairman who had been her political adviser; and Sir Robin Ibbs, his successor and by then deputy chairman of Lloyds Bank Their task was to judge whether the NHS reforms would work.

In June 1990, just nine months before the NHS reforms were to take effect, Margaret Thatcher summoned to Downing Street her Secretary of State for Health, Kenneth Clarke, and his top NHS management team: Duncan Nichol, the NHS chief executive; Peter Griffiths, his deputy; and Sheila Masters, a private sector financial wizard who had been brought in to help implement the most dramatic changes that the NHS had seen since 1948. The developers, who were not concerned with the Secretary of State’s wider policy towards out-of-town shopping centres, but had a sufficiently independent interest to protect where the scale of the development and the importance of the outcome were both of exceptional size and weight, were entitled to their costs.Duncan Ousley QC and Christopher Katkowski (Treasury Solicitor) for the Secretary of State; Brian Ash QC and Paul Stinchcombe (Stephenson Harwood) for the developers, Manchester Ship Canal Co; Susan Hamilton QC and Sebastian Head (Nabarro Nathanson) for Trafford Park Development Corpn; Robin Purchas QC and Meyric Lewis (Sharpe Pritchard) for a consortium of councils.. A second set of costs was more likely to be awarded at first instance than in the Court of Appeal or House of Lords, by which time the issues should have crystallised. An award of a third set of costs would rarely be justified.In the present case the Secretary of State was entitled to the whole of his costs. The developer would not normally be entitled to his costs unless he could show that there was likely to be a separate issue not covered by counsel for the Secretary of State on which he was entitled to be heard or he had an interest which required separate representation. The mere fact he was a developer would not of itself justify a second set of costs. Costs were always in the discretion of the court and a practice must never be allowed to harden into a rule.

The Secretary of State, when successful in defending his decision would normally be entitled to the whole of his costs He should not be required to share his award of costs. If he stated his conclusions on vital issues and although his reasons might not be very full and were in certain respects badly expressed, they were adequate.As to the question of costs where there had been multiple representation in planning appeals, the fundamental rule with costs was there were no rules. His Lordship was now persuaded that that was not the effect of the 1982 Act, and that the English court was free to apply the doctrine of forum non conveniens as between two jurisdictions within the UK.Manuel Barca (Morrison Skirrow) for the defendants; HNA Starte (Biddle & Co) for the plaintiff.PlanningBolton MDC v Secretary of State for the Environment and others; HL (Lord Goff of Chieveley, Lord Mustill, Lord Slynn of Hadley, Lord Lloyd of Berwick and Lord Steyn); 24 May 1995; 6 July 1995The Secretary of State’s decision letter on planning appeals should state his reasons in sufficient detail to enable the reader to know what conclusions had been reached on the principal important controversial issues. In so holding his Lordship departed from his own previous decision in Foxen v Scotsman Publication Ltd (the Independent, 28 March 1994) that to preserve the doctrine of forum non conveniens as between different jurisdiction within a single contracting state was contrary to the spirit of the European Convention on Jurisdiction and Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters 1968 which applied in the UK by virtue of the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982. The words “improper use of the computer” in s 69 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 meant that the use of the computer had to amount to impropriety, for example using the computer in such a way as to provide an unfair result so as to produce evidence that was weighted against the defendant. Here the computer print-out could not constitute “improper use” as the print-out contained evidence which was to the advantage of the defendant as it showed the machine had reduced the figure for the alcohol content in the defendant’s blood to allow for the acetone.Andrew Alty (Green D’Sa & Sons, Leicester) for the defendant; Paul Mann (CPS) for the prosecutor.LibelCumming v Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail Ltd and ors; QBD (Drake J); 30 March 1995The English High Court had jurisdiction to stay a libel action brought in England by a Scottish plaintiff against Scottish defendants on the ground that the case should more properly be tried in Scotland. It followed that affidavit evidence based on information or belief was inadmissible on the application.Philip Bartle (Philip Jackson & Co, Newcastle upon Tyne) for the first respondent; Andrew Rigney (Manches & Co) for the second respondent; Simon Barker (Stockdale & Reid, North Shields) for the applicants.Computer evidenceAshton v DPP; QBD(DC)(Balcombe LJ, Buxton J); 23 June 1995Magistrates were correct in admitting in evidence a computer print-out from a Lion Intoximeter which bore the words “trace acetone”, having decided there were no grounds for believing that the statement was inaccurate by reason of improper use of the computer.