Over Christmas, Thatcher discussed with close colleagues the option of sacking Heseltine, as Brittan had urged her to do (Chief Whip John Wakeham cautioned against), but—as she later admitted in her memoirs—she shrank from doing so as he was too popular and weighty a political figure. Thatcher and ministerial colleagues spent two and a half hours writing three successive drafts of a letter threatening Heseltine with the sack, but did not send it as her press adviser Bernard Ingham advised that Heseltine might use it an excuse to resign.