Mrs Thatcher would certainly find it hard when the roles were reversed at the annual prime-ministerial visit to Balmoral. It is a tradition that the Royal Family like to do the cooking and cleaning, whenever there is a barbecue. The Prime Minister was almost goaded beyond endurance watching the Queen washing up after dinner. After yet another prime-ministerial offer of well-meaning but unwanted assistance, the Queen was heard to tell her lady-in-waiting: ‘Could someone tell that woman to sit down.’ When Mrs Thatcher wrote her thank-you letter afterwards, she included a pair of washing-up gloves.
According to the Queen’s former Private Secretary, Sir William Heseltine, both monarch and Prime Minister enjoyed a strong mutual respect rather than a great rapport. ‘It was a very correct relationship. There were other prime ministers with whom relations seemed warmer,’ he says, pointing to the Labour leaders of the Seventies, Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. ‘It was my observation that she was more at ease with these two. With Mrs Thatcher, relationships were always very proper but not perhaps as relaxed as with these two Labour PMs.’
As Moore has pointed out, Mrs Thatcher was extremely nervous at these meetings, arriving with a lengthy list of pressing matters. Since it was not in the Queen’s nature to interrupt, the audiences could easily descend into a monologue. Robin Butler, who would accompany his boss to the Palace, suspects that they may not have been the most fruitful exchanges. ‘I had a sense she had this list on her lap and worked her way conscientiously through it, which is probably not what the Queen wanted.’ Contrary to the stereotypical Mrs Thatcher portrayed in cartoons and satirical dramas, the real one was not nearly as imperious as her detractors have suggested. ‘She was not over-confident,’ says Robin Butler. ‘She was assertive because she was lacking in confidence. I got used to the fact she could listen while she talked and take it on board but you had to talk against her.’ That was hardly the Queen’s style.
Early tensions between the new Tory government, the Commonwealth and the Palace would subside after that triumph at the Lusaka Heads of Government Meeting in 1979. Just weeks into her premiership, Mrs Thatcher had helped devise a strategy that would bring peace to war-ravaged Rhodesia and would lead to black majority rule in a newly independent Zimbabwe. Many politicians have subsequently shared the credit for that achievement, although, as we now discover, the sudden outbreak of harmony owed so much to the discreet but determined interventions of the Queen herself. However, the leaders of the ‘family of nations’ would not stay united for long. And the Queen’s powers of reconciliation would be even more important as a new Commonwealth fault line opened up during the 1980s, which would leave Mrs Thatcher on one side and everyone else on the other.
APARTHEID AND SANCTIONS
To begin with, the post-Lusaka consensus held firm. Things continued to go surprisingly well between the right-wing occupant of Number Ten and the predominantly left-leaning members of the Commonwealth. In 1982, Mrs Thatcher realised what a positive asset the Commonwealth could be, when Argentinian forces invaded the Falkland Islands. As Britain prepared to recapture sovereign territory and liberate the Queen’s 1,800 British subjects living there, the post-colonial cousinhood rallied round. There was united Commonwealth support for Britain at the United Nations and, in some cases, military assistance, too. New Zealand offered to take over the Royal Navy’s duties in the Caribbean, freeing up an extra warship for the Falklands task force. The Queen could certainly see ways in which the Commonwealth might help, according to one senior member of her staff. ‘She wasn’t actually ringing round but she might say in a conversation with the Prime Minister: “You might find that so and so has got a frigate”.’
A year later, however, as the Commonwealth heads were meeting in Delhi, that Falklands consensus was already fading. New divisions were opening up on either side of that eternal question: what should be done about South Africa? The Queen had witnessed the racial divisions herself during that 1947 tour with her parents. The fact that King George VI had not even been allowed to pin medals on black South African war veterans lingered long in royal minds. The British Royal Family had been seen as a sympathetic ally among the black community, so much so that a prominent law student called Nelson Mandela had urged members of the African National Congress to give the King a respectful welcome.
But a year later, the election of the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party had set the country on the path to apartheid – the system of dividing the nation on racial lines, with the whites in charge. Over the next decade, during which the Princess was crowned Queen of South Africa along with all her other realms, the government would bring in laws forbidding black Africans from entering certain parts of the country and a ban on mixed marriages. These were all laws passed in the Queen’s name. However, her position was becoming increasingly untenable. How could she remain Queen of the United Kingdom, which was embarking on a post-imperial policy of granting independence and majority rule to its former colonies, and, at the same time, be Queen of South Africa, which was doing the complete opposite?
Matters would come to a head in 1960, when the South African Prime Minister, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, announced his referendum on creating a South African republic. A month later, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, came to deliver his ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African parliament. One month after that, global condemnation followed a police attack on an unarmed crowd in Sharpeville. Several thousand blacks had gathered to protest against laws requiring them to carry passbooks. Sixty-nine of them were killed, in what would always be known as the Sharpeville Massacre. There were instant calls for South Africa to be expelled from the Commonwealth – though there was no need, following Verwoerd’s successful referendum campaign to replace the Queen with a President (though the black majority had no vote). As has been shown, Commonwealth rules at the time required any nation that did not have the Queen as head of state to apply for membership. Having just become a republic, South Africa would therefore have to reapply. The fury voiced at the meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers in London in March 1961 made it very clear how that would end. So Verwoerd tore up his application before it was submitted. Thus began South Africa’s three decades in the wilderness.
The country turned in on itself, as groups like the African National Congress (ANC) began to advocate resistance and sabotage. In 1962, Nelson Mandela, a leader of the ANC’s armed wing, was arrested and in 1964, along with several others, was sentenced to life imprisonment (the prosecution had called for the death penalty). The struggle would continue from afar, thanks to the British-based Anti-Apartheid Movement. Over the years, a series of political, economic and sporting international boycotts would extend South Africa’s isolation, though it was not until the mid-1980s that the pressure for change reached a new level. With Mikhail Gorbachev now in charge of the Soviet Union, East-West relations began to thaw. South Africa increasingly became the dominant foreign-policy issue of the day. By the 1980s, newly independent Zimbabwe had shown how black majority rule could be achieved. For the Commonwealth – and particularly for the younger African ex-colonies of the ‘new’ Commonwealth – there was no more important matter on the world stage. Here was a country where a white man could still beat a black worker to death and be fined £700; where infant mortality rates were 2.7 per cent for a white baby and 40 per cent for a black baby.
How best to bring about change though? The chief stumbling block was economic sanctions. Most Commonwealth states felt that these were critical in pushing South Africa’s apartheid regime to the brink. Not so Mrs Thatcher, who believed that sanctions were harmful, both to the poorest in South Africa and to British trade interests. The Commonwealth Secretary-General of the period, Sir Sonny Ramphal, remains a stern critic of her stance. In his memoirs he goes as far as blaming Mrs Thatcher for keeping Mandela in prison. Had she not blocked sanctions so forcefully, he wrote, South Africa ‘might not have been offered the lifeline it was given and Nelson Mandela might not have been robbed of a further deca
de of his freedom’. A major part of his memoirs is a section called, simply, ‘The Thatcher Years’.
During the first few months of her premiership, Ramphal had gone to considerable efforts to prevent the African members of the Commonwealth from ‘ganging up’ on Mrs Thatcher, notably at that Commonwealth summit in Lusaka. It had been a shrewd move at the time, but now he would become more combative in his dealings. Mrs Thatcher, for her part, was finding the Commonwealth increasingly exasperating. As Charles Moore has pointed out, she particularly loathed being harangued about South Africa by countries that were, themselves, conducting secret trade deals with South Africa. She was also instinctively wary of nations that did not share her enthusiasm for the battle against international communism, something that a number of Commonwealth nations positively embraced. Mrs Thatcher would spend much of the Delhi summit defending America from a lot of vociferous anti-American rhetoric. The USA was in the Commonwealth doghouse, not least for its invasion of Grenada earlier in the year. Mrs Thatcher had her own reasons to be angry about Grenada. The US President, Ronald Reagan, her friend and ally, had attacked one of the Queen’s Commonwealth realms without having had the courtesy to inform either the Queen or her British Prime Minister. At the Delhi summit, however, Mrs Thatcher ended up defending Reagan vigorously – so much so that there was virtually no mention of the USA in the final communiqué, beyond a call for fresh dialogue with the Soviet Union. Writing to Reagan about it, Mrs Thatcher added: ‘It is by no means an ideal document but you should have seen the earlier versions!’
It did not help that the arrangements for the Delhi summit bordered on the chaotic. At one point during the retreat to Goa, Denis Thatcher’s patience finally snapped during yet another power cut. He stormed out onto the couple’s hotel balcony and proclaimed to anyone within earshot: ‘This place is very high on the buggeration factor!’ Denis Thatcher was not the only one infuriated by some of the arrangements at the 1983 Commonwealth summit. The Queen and her staff were equally frustrated by a series of pointless confrontations with the Indian government. Though Lord Butler recalls the Queen’s high regard for the veteran Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, the same did not apply to her officials. Before the Queen had even landed, her arrival plans had to bend to the demands of Hindu astrologers, who warned that the scheduled touchdown at noon was inauspicious. The Queen’s VC10 was duly delayed until 12.05. The most absurd quarrel occurred when the Queen was preparing to welcome Mother Teresa of Calcutta to her guest quarters at the presidential palace. The monarch was planning to salute the Nobel Prize-winning charity worker, nun and future saint by presenting her with the Order of Merit, the same honour that her great-grandfather had awarded to Florence Nightingale. What was supposed to be one of the highlights of the royal visit turned to farce when the Indian government intervened, saying it was ‘impossible’. ‘They said: “There’s no way the Queen can possibly give any order to anybody in the presidential palace.” It was forbidden,’ says Sir William Heseltine. ‘They were bent on putting obstacles in the way.’ The Queen circumvented the problem by giving Mother Teresa her OM in the garden. As it turned out, it was a prettier and more appropriate location – and made for a better photograph, too.
The Queen’s Indian visit had left a mark on her, however – one that would cause a certain amount of discomfort at Downing Street. In her 1983 Christmas broadcast she dwelt at length on the poverty she had witnessed. Before arriving in India, the Queen had visited Bangladesh, where she was visibly moved by an encounter with a tiny, starving child called Jamal. She promised his carers that she would raise his case with Princess Anne, who was due to visit the capital city, Dhaka, a few months later as President of Save the Children.† In her broadcast, the Queen departed from the usual Christmas script to include a short economics lesson: ‘In spite of all the progress that has been made, the greatest problem in the world today remains the gap between rich and poor countries, and we shall not begin to close this gap until we hear less about nationalism and more about interdependence. One of the main aims of the Commonwealth is to make an effective contribution towards redressing the economic balance between nations.’
The Head of the Commonwealth went even further with a few suggestions: ‘What we want to see is still more modern technology being used by poorer countries to provide employment and to produce primary products and components, which will be bought in turn by the richer countries at competitive prices.’ Noting various technical advances, she also pointed up their shortcomings. ‘Perhaps even more serious is the risk that this mastery of technology may blind us to the more fundamental needs of people. Electronics cannot create comradeship; computers cannot generate compassion; satellites cannot transmit tolerance.’ In tone and substance, this was an astonishing address
The broadcast was also a major news story. The Queen was being ‘political’, said the right-of-centre press, adding that she clearly had an agenda. It was not one shared by her Prime Minister, either. Was the Queen now ‘ganging up’ on Mrs Thatcher like everyone else?
The suspicion was that the Commonwealth Secretariat of Sonny Ramphal had been bending the royal ear. Into this debate stepped the ferociously anti-Commonwealth Ulster Unionist MP, Enoch Powell. He did not want to see the Queen putting the ‘interests and affairs of other countries’ ahead of the best interests of the British. The Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, stoked things further. Instead of a ‘no comment’, he issued a statement. ‘The Christmas broadcast is a personal message to her Commonwealth,’ it said. ‘The Queen has all her people at heart, irrespective of race, creed or colour.’ The Christmas broadcast is, indeed, the one official royal utterance that is not delivered on ministerial advice. The Times, historically the paragon of establishment thinking and firmly supportive of Mrs Thatcher, went further than Powell. The Rupert Murdoch-owned paper published a stern editorial. The warning that the Queen had been duped by fashionable ‘global egalitarianism’ and her ‘questionable’ economic theory was a legitimate topic of debate. It was but a foretaste of rows to come.
BRITANNIA CALMS THE WAVES
The next Commonwealth summit, in 1985, was even more ill-tempered. The ‘club’ was convening in the capital of the Bahamas, Nassau, and the issue of South African sanctions had reached a critical moment. Unless the Commonwealth agreed to specific measures against apartheid, some of its members would resign from the organisation altogether. The obstacle to such measures would, inevitably, be Mrs Thatcher. As in Lusaka, the Queen would have her work cut out keeping the peace.
More than three decades later, some find it baffling that Mrs Thatcher should have been so stout in her defence of the South African regime. Many – including David Cameron – detect the hand of Denis. ‘Mrs Thatcher was on the wrong side of that argument. It was so unnecessary but there was Denis,’ says Cameron. He sums up the Denis Thatcher world view as: “You can say what you like about South Africa but with the whites in charge, at least it’s working . . .” As the former Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary, Patrick Wright, noted in his diary in 1986: ‘All her (and Denis’s) instincts are in favour of the South African Whites.’
In his biography of Lady Thatcher, Charles Moore reveals how Denis Thatcher’s fondness for South Africa went deep. He had relatives there, and it was to South Africa that he went in 1964 to recover from a nervous breakdown. Mrs Thatcher was more sceptical, regarding apartheid as a form of ‘racial socialism’. She was friendly with anti-apartheid campaigners like Helen Suzman (whom she nominated for an honorary GCMG, Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, the highest honour for a diplomat). Mrs Thatcher’s primary goal was a nonviolent transition rather than a revolution. Much as it may surprise the left-wing critics who have demonised her ever since, she also did something that neither of her Labour predecessors had done. She was the first British Prime Minister to seek the release of Nelson Mandela.
The stakes could hardly have been higher ahead of the 1985 Commonwealth summit. Addressing journa
lists in London, Sonny Ramphal announced that the Nassau meeting might well be as historically significant as the abolition of slavery. Mrs Thatcher had no such expectations. According to Charles Moore, when the British Airways chairman, Lord King, offered her a seat on a special Commonwealth Concorde flight to Nassau, she declined. ‘Stick to VC10s,’ she wrote on a memo. She had no wish to be accused of upstaging the Queen. With the Royal Yacht Britannia in pride of place in the harbour, there was little chance of that.
The Queen was not sitting idly by on the margins. Well aware of the threat to her organisation, the Head of the Commonwealth was doing some discreet pre-emptive peacemaking. The Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, would later admit that she had been leaning on him. ‘The Queen personally asked me to work with other leaders to prevent a major split within the group,’ he wrote. Other leaders – including Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and Australia’s Bob Hawke – did the same. The Iron Lady, however, was in truly ferrous form. When battle commenced, it was fierce and uncompromising. First to speak on South Africa was Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia. ‘If the Commonwealth refuses to do something definite then the club should cease to pretend,’ he declared. ‘It should admit that it really cannot contribute to solving the problems faced by its members, if not the world.’
Then things became more personal. When she was accused of putting pennies ahead of ‘black lives’, Mrs Thatcher accused others around the table of rank hypocrisy for their own dealings with South Africa. ‘I had never been so insulted as I had by the people in that room,’ she wrote in her memoirs. As with any heated argument in which people say something they instantly regret, so the Commonwealth leaders realised that perhaps the ganging up had gone too far. Wrath gave way to a search for some sort of consensus. Sonny Ramphal eventually stitched up a deal to which everyone could sign up. It was agreed that the Commonwealth would implement a series of minor sanctions, such as a ban on krugerrand coins and trade promotions. More importantly, Bob Hawke secured an agreement that the Commonwealth would send an ‘eminent persons group’ to South Africa. Though some African nations disliked the idea of any dialogue with the apartheid regime, it would turn out to be both a vital and an inspired proposal. Unity had been maintained, although Mrs Thatcher would not go home without upsetting everyone once more. When a journalist suggested that she had finally come round to the idea of sanctions, she replied witheringly that they were little more than a ‘tiny’ gesture. Her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, was appalled. The Commonwealth had given a large amount of ground to meet her, and now she had undone all that goodwill by belittling the deal. His boss, he later recalled, had ‘humiliated three dozen other heads of government, devalued the policy which they just agreed, and demeaned herself’.
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