Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  There was a gold seam and a fault-line in Margaret Thatcher’s conduct of foreign policy. Both owed a great deal to her Grantham upbringing at the height of the Second World War. The gold seam was her instinctive respect for the United States combined with a genuine if occasionally exasperated friendship with its fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. Together they created the strongest chapter of the US–UK ‘special relationship’ since the days of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  The fault-line was her instinctive dislike and distrust of the Germans. Her views about them were formulated in the Grantham of the 1940s. She was at her most impressionable age. Britain was at war as a great nation-state. Churchill’s broadcasts thrilled her patriotic pride. She could see how strongly the English-speaking peoples were united in their determination to overcome the tyranny of Nazi Germany. By day, air-crews from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and above all America came and went through Grantham on leave or on duty. By night, the roar of their Lancaster or Troop Carrier aircraft were heard overhead the town as they flew in and out of the forty-nine RAF and USAF bases in Lincolnshire. Sometimes the roar of the Luftwaffe aircraft came the other way, inflicting 386 raids on Grantham with eighty-nine killed as well as 191 injured.

  Crouching under the kitchen table that doubled up as an air-raid shelter in the Roberts family home at North Parade, this was the world in which Margaret grew up. By the time she was prime minister, four decades later, most of that world had moved on. But some parts of her personality remained unmoved. Her romantic patriotism, her pro-American idealism, her veneration for military courage and her longings for Churchillian big picture policy-making surfaced regularly in her life at No. 10. These traits were most discernible in her attitudes and approach to foreign policy.

  Lord Carrington recalled:

  I honestly came to think that she was only able to relate to people whose mother tongue was the English language. Americans first, Old Commonwealth second including up to a point the South Africans. But after that, with one or two exceptions like the Israelis, she could not enter the foreign mind-set. She was impatient with their whole attitude and approach. She would give them her view – pretty vigorously. It was rare for her to accept their view. Language was at the heart of this problem, particularly her inability to respond to the nuances of what Europeans were saying.1

  For all her nationalism, it would be wrong to portray Margaret Thatcher as a stubborn Little Englander with a closed mind. She was usually but not invariably open to argument – which she enjoyed as an essential part of her decision-making process. Hammered out on the anvil of realpolitik, her prejudices could soften or sharpen, depending on who was hammering with or against her. ‘And provided they got to her early enough’, said Carrington.2

  This was a curious way of making foreign policy, but on the gold seam of the UK’s relations with the US it worked well because the Prime Minister’s instincts, interests and intellect were usually in alignment.

  Even so, there were bumps in the road. During the eight years of the Reagan Presidency that began in 1981, there were some serious disagreements between London and Washington. Yet the way they were handled showed the strength of the ‘special relationship’, and the warmth of the rapport between the occupants of the White House and No. 10 Downing Street. By contrast, Margaret Thatcher’s fault-lines with Germany and the EEC turned increasingly cold and sour.

  The explanation for these differences lay largely in the personality of Margaret Thatcher. Her formative experiences in Grantham were one part of it, but two other ingredients counted more. The first was her idealistic view of the United States as the economic and political superpower that could be relied upon to uphold the values of freedom and the rule of law. The second was that she saw Ronald Reagan as the politically and personally attractive champion of those values. She was as patient with his simplicities as she was impatient with the EEC’s complexities. To understand why US–UK co-operation climbed to its highest post-war peak during the 1980s, it is important to understand the chemistry between the President and the Prime Minister. That was the X-factor that breathed new life into the relationship, making it so productive and so special.

  THE PERSONAL CHEMISTRY

  The ‘special relationship’, now approaching its seventy-fifth birthday, has a long history of charming irrelevancies about how warm the personal relations were between US President X and British Prime Minister Y. Much of it is collaborative fiction organised between aides and journalists who love to embellish the legend of how well the two leaders bonded during various leisurely pursuits; from walks in the Camp David woods to watching basketball in Ohio. But the Thatcher–Reagan rapport really was different. The most interesting difference was not the obvious one: that he was a man’s man while she was a feminine woman. The profound and enduring difference was that they could have formidable and forthrightly expressed disagreements, yet build the UK–US relationship into greater strengths of co-operation than at any time since she first saw it from the impressionable vantage of a Grantham schoolgirl.

  To the superficial eye, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were an odd couple. It is difficult to imagine two more different characters. He was the blue-sky Californian who felt safest when sticking to broad principles and cue-carded stories. He could be a great communicator, but was limited in his intellectual reach. Full of folksy charm, he disliked detail, argument and confrontation.

  She was the polar opposite. Chillingly analytical in her absorption of briefing material, she relished confrontational debate on points of detail. One of her personal mottos was ‘I argue therefore I am’.3 On her home turf she was scathing about politicians who had not mastered their briefs, or who tried to soft soap her with touches of humour that she could rarely see the point of. She had to discipline herself into a personality makeover to get along with Reagan, but she managed it.

  The odd couple first met in on 9 April 1975, when Reagan was passing through London as part of his preparations to run for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. He made a number of calls on Westminster politicians, including the newly elected Leader of the Opposition.

  Their meeting in her room at the House of Commons was scheduled to take forty-five minutes, but lasted for an hour and a half. The reason why they got on so well originated in a glowing recommendation of Reagan from Denis, who had heard him talking at an Institute of Directors conference some years earlier.

  The handsome Governor of California soon won the admiration of Margaret Thatcher with his good looks, good humour and good conservative views. ‘It was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding freedom’,4 was Reagan’s take on the potential future prime minister of Britain. He described her in his next weekly radio broadcast, Viewpoint, as ‘a woman of charm and poise and also strength. The British like their politicians to stand for something and she does’.5

  Margaret Thatcher was equally complimentary. ‘I was immediately won over by his charm, directness and sense of humour’, she wrote afterwards.6

  The good impressions continued at a distance, but were put to their first real test when Margaret Thatcher flew to Washington on 25 February 1981 for three days of talks and ceremonial meetings with the newly inaugurated President Reagan. For all the media briefings about their ‘personal friendship’, the two leaders did not know each other well, and used the formal terms ‘Mr President’ and ‘ Madam Prime Minister’ throughout their conversations during this visit.

  In her preparations before coming to Washington, Margaret Thatcher held Chequers seminars and immersed herself in foreign-policy briefing papers to bring herself up to speed with the new president’s agenda. She was, according to one member of her team, ‘on a complete high’ and ‘tremendously worked up about seeing Reagan alone’.7 She had demanded information about his reading habits, his priorities and his intellectual interests. The answers to these inquiries yielded a thin harvest. Margaret Thatch
er was gently warned that the President liked to see himself as a chairman of a board of governors and not as a hands-on manager of the government like a prime minister. This was good advice because at the first Reagan–Thatcher summit there were no debates about policy issues and no strategic tour d’horizon of the international scene. The Prime Minister was amazed at the President’s broad-brush approach, but she played her game according to his rules.

  Since the game turned out to be one of mood music, both leaders per- formed good tunes. At a black-tie dinner at the British Embassy on the night of 27 February, the Prime Minister quoted Charles Dickens’s description of Americans as ‘By nature frank, brave, cordial, hospitable and affectionate’. Turning to Reagan with an expansive flourish, she continued, ‘That seems to me, Mr President, to be a prefect description of the man who has been my host for the last 48 hours.’ Abandoning her prepared text, she spoke emotionally about ‘two o’clock in the morning courage’, when the toughest and loneliest decisions have to be taken by a president. She assured him, ‘When those moments come, we here in this room, on both sides of the Atlantic, have in you total faith that you will make the decision which is right for protecting the liberty of common humanity in the future’.8

  Reagan was visibly moved by this tribute, particularly the passage about two o’clock in the morning courage. So his off-the-cuff opening began, ‘Prime Minister, Bob Hope [who was sitting at a table a few feet away] will know what I mean when I speak in the language of my previous occupation and say, you’re a hard act to follow’. The laughter and applause that followed this thespian compliment was genuine. So was Reagan’s entry in his private diary that night. ‘Dinner at British Embassy. Truly a warm & beautiful occasion.’9

  Margaret Thatcher reciprocated these warm feelings. In an emphatic handwritten thank you letter to the British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, she wrote: ‘There will never be a happier party than the one you gave at the Embassy – all due to you both … I have great confidence in the President. I believe he will do the things he wants to do – and he won’t give up.’10

  The following day, after the Thatchers and the Reagans met alone for morning coffee in the family quarters of the White House, the President again recorded sentimental thoughts: ‘I believe a real friendship exists between the P.M., her family & us – certainly we feel that way, & I’m sure they do.’11

  It was not quite love at first sight despite the best efforts of the spin doctors to make it sound that way. Margaret Thatcher was underwhelmed by the Reagan mind. Later in their relationship she sometimes became upset by some of Reagan’s policies – on the Falklands, on economic sanctions against the Soviet Union and on Grenada. But the two leaders saw eye to eye on virtually everything else. And when they differed, after the temperature had cooled, they could agree to disagree with complete lack of rancour. As Reagan disarmingly put it, ‘I don’t think any of the disagreements have survived as disagreements once we could talk to each other. Some of them might have been the result of distance and not having heard the entire story, and when it is told, then everything is just fine.’12

  Living happily ever after is more of a Reagan legend than a Thatcher one, for she could sometimes be contemptuous towards those who took policy positions when they had not briefed themselves fully. But she was careful not to give way to such upbraidings in her dealings with the President of the United States. As a result, the ‘special relationship’ became fruitful and powerful in the years 1981 to 1989, reaching decisions that galvanised the Western Alliance and brought benefits to both Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

  ISLANDS AND TENSIONS

  In spite of the growing bonds of personal chemistry between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, there were three international episodes that temporarily threatened to dent if not damage the US–UK ‘special relationship’. They were: the Falklands crisis, the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. All presented serious problems, in which the personality of Margaret Thatcher was pivotal. Yet all were solved more swiftly and subtly than might have been expected.

  As recorded in earlier chapters, President Reagan had to suppress splits within his administration, and misgivings of his own in order to give Margaret Thatcher the support she needed in the Falklands War. But despite the early Washington wobbles, Britain in the end received the American weaponry and intelligence it needed to re-take the Islands.

  Later developments in the Falklands produced fresh UK–US tensions. Once a new democratically elected government had been installed in Buenos Aires, the US wanted to support it by voting for a UN resolution calling for renewed negotiations on the future of the Islands. Margaret Thatcher tried to persuade the US to oppose the UN plan. Ronald Reagan ignored her plea. ‘He was getting a little bit fed up with her imperious attitude in the matter’, commented George Shultz.13

  A subsequent problem was the question of easing the US embargo on arms sales to Argentina. Margaret Thatcher was against it, and was tactically clever in her blocking manoeuvre. Four years after the conflict, the Pentagon and State Departments had prepared a relaxation of the embargo. It awaited only the President’s approval. Just when this looked a mere formality, the British Prime Minister came to Camp David on 15 November 1986 to discuss nuclear arms issues arising from the Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik. At the end of a long agenda, Margaret Thatcher casually slipped into the conversation a last-minute item about the South Atlantic. According to Geoffrey Smith, writing for The Times: ‘Oh, arms to Argentina’, she said, for all the world like a housewife checking that she had not forgotten some last minute piece of shopping. ‘You won’t, will you?’ To the horror of his officials, Reagan fell for it. ‘No’, he replied. ‘We won’t.’ So, in one short sentence he killed months of careful preparation within his administration.14

  Another island that caused a second flashpoint in US–UK relations was Grenada. In this tiny Caribbean country, an independent nation within the Commonwealth whose Head of State was Queen Elizabeth II, a Marxist elected government was overthrown in a coup by other Marxists. When this happened, the Reagan administration decided to invade Grenada to restore order. The pretext used was a combination of alleged fears for the safety of American students on the island, and the alleged need to respond to a request for military intervention from the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a group of neighbouring islands. The US President notified the British Prime Minister that he was considering the OECS request. He asked her for her thoughts and advice.

  Margaret Thatcher received this presidential communication as she was on her way out to a dinner on Monday 24 October 1983. It was a farewell event in honour of the retiring US Ambassador to the Court of St James, John J. Louis Jr. The American Ambassador was just as much in the dark as the British Prime Minister about developments in Grenada. By the time she was back from toasting the departing envoy, a second message arrived from the President. It said that the US invasion of Grenada was about to begin.

  Margaret Thatcher went ballistic. After a short midnight meeting with her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, and her Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine (both dumbfounded by the US action), she telephoned President Reagan on the hot-line. He had to withdraw from a meeting of Congressional leaders to go into a side room to take the Prime Minister’s call. His side of it was all too audible.

  ‘I could hear him plain as day’, recalled Senator Howard Baker. He said, ‘Margaret …’ Long pause. ‘But Margaret …’, and he came back sort of sheepish and said, ‘Mrs Thatcher has strong reservations about this’.15

  They may have been strong, but they were too late. As Reagan wrote in his diary that night, ‘Margaret Thatcher called. She’s upset & doesn’t think we should do it. I couldn’t tell her that it had started.’16

  The episode caused the British government no little embarrassment. ‘Humiliation in Grenada’ is the title of the relevant chapter in Geoffrey Howe’s memoirs. The Prime Minister shared his frustrati
ons. ‘I felt dismayed and let down by what had happened’, she recalled. ‘At best, the British Government had been made to look impotent: at worst, we looked deceitful.’17

  At Westminster, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, Denis Healey, exploited this discomfort to the full. ‘The British people will not relish the spectacle of their Prime Minister allowing President Reagan to walk all over her’, he said, successfully applying for an emergency debate on Grenada.18

  In the middle of this parliamentary storm, Margaret Thatcher was called from her seat on the front bench to take a call from the White House. ‘I was not in the sunniest of moods’, she remembered.19 Sensing the frozen atmosphere from her opening; ‘Hello, Margaret Thatcher here’, Reagan did his best to spread a little sunshine with a folksy quip from his Western movies days.

  ‘If I were there, Margaret,’ he began, ‘I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.’

  ‘There’s no need to do that’, she replied, failing to understand the allusion until it was explained to her afterwards.20

  The chilliness of her response appeared to unnerve the President. He was used to being cajoled, charmed or vigorously interrupted by Margaret Thatcher. ‘The cold shoulder treatment was something new … momentarily he seemed to panic’, was how the American historian Richard Aldous portrayed the moment.21

  For the next three minutes Reagan delivered a stumbling monologue explaining why the invasion of Grenada needed to be planned with great speed and secrecy to avoid leaks. ‘But I want you to know it was no feeling on our part of lack of confidence at your end’, he assured the Prime Minister. ‘It’s at our end.’22

  At the Westminster end of the line, the President’s words were falling on unforgiving ears. He tried again and again to elicit sympathy and understand- ing from his ‘special relationship’ partner, but on this occasion she remained the Iceberg Lady. Finally Reagan offered one last apology: ‘I’m sorry for any embarrassment that we caused you, but please understand that it was just our fear of our own weakness over here with regard to secrecy.’