Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  The admiration was mutual. ‘From that visit I formed the view that Margaret Thatcher was a good thing’, he recalled. ‘I never shared the prevailing Foreign Office wisdom that she was a ghastly, narrow middle-class housewife. I thought Britain needed her no-nonsense, reforming approach.’

  During his next career stints as a Special Counsellor on the Rhodesia negotiations, and in Brussels as a Counsellor in the Office of the UK Representative to the European Community, Powell continued to catch the Prime Minister’s eye. In the latter job he managed to communicate his well-informed Euroscepticism to her. This might have impeded his progress on the career ladder of the Diplomatic Service. It did him a power of good when he was interviewed for the post of Foreign Affairs Private Secretary at No. 10.

  She thought he ‘talked far too much’,7 but did not see any other candidate. Once appointed, Powell went from strength to strength. His rapport with his boss grew into an almost mystical bond based initially on shared political instincts and on the shared laughter and joie de vivre provided by Carla. The Prime Minister used to introduce her to guests at No. 10 receptions with the qualification, ‘She’s Italian, you know’.8 The vital ingredient in the bonding was Charles Powell’s talent for reading Margaret Thatcher’s mind. He then communicated it across Whitehall and the world in minutes, which conveyed her will-power in his linguistic power. This process became so perfected that in the words of one senior China expert at the FCO, Sir Percy Cradock, ‘It was sometimes equally difficult to establish where Mrs Thatcher ended and where Charles Powell began’.9

  Less than a year after Powell joined the elite team of No. 10 private secretaries, Margaret Thatcher was flexing her wings with increasing vigour as a Prime Minister who was her own Foreign Secretary. She was taking more and more of her own foreign-policy initiatives, not least in the neglected field of East–West relations.

  In February 1984, Margaret Thatcher made her first visit as Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. If her journey to Hungary was intended to be a move towards unsettling the satellites, it proved successful, and was followed by several later forays into the capital cities of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In Budapest she was given what she called ‘A warm, even passionate, welcome’ from the shoppers in the central covered market.10 The experience, and some of her conversations with individual Hungarians, reaffirmed her belief that the thawing of the Cold War would come from establishing a warmer understanding of the societies in the pivotal countries behind the Iron Curtain.

  Another influence on Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to engage with the Soviet Union at this time came through top-secret intelligence based on disclosures from Oleg Gordievsky. He was a senior KGB official who had become a double agent working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – MI6. Gordievsky reported only a few weeks earlier, in November 1983, that Soviet aircraft had moved to combat-readiness for a nuclear strike against the West. These astonishing preparations arose from a mistaken over-reaction to a routine NATO annual exercise code named ‘Able Archer 83’. The Soviet high command had wrongly concluded that the NATO war games were the prelude to a real war. Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to these top-secret reports was to conclude that the West needed far more effective channels of communication with Moscow.11

  Ten days after her visit to Hungary, Margaret Thatcher travelled to Moscow to attend the funeral of the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, on 14 February 1984. On the flight, she immersed herself in the Foreign Office briefing papers, at one point making the comment: ‘Are there no young Russian leaders? They don’t seem to come out of the kindergarten until they’re 65.’12

  At the long and cold obsequies for Andropov, Margaret Thatcher had a fortuitous encounter with the young Soviet leader who was to change the destiny of his country and the world. This was Mikhail Gorbachev, who paid her a small gesture of respect not because she was the British Prime Minister but because he noticed her courtesy at the funeral.

  Under the Kremlin’s arrangements, visiting Western dignitaries were not allocated seats. They had to stand in a VIP enclosure in Red Square for over an hour as the funeral cortège and its military escort passed by. Most of the foreign leaders kept warm by stamping their feet and talking amongst themselves. Margaret Thatcher was freezing, too. But sensibly shod in fur-lined boots, she kept her distance from the other VIPs,# standing alone in exemplary stillness and silence. Her respectful demeanour and her bows to the coffin were appreciated by Gorbachev.

  A protégé of the deceased General Secretary, he was a rising figure in the Politburo, but virtually unknown in the West. At the end of the ceremonies, he approached the Prime Minister and gallantly escorted her to a warm room. ‘I remember how you took care of me. It was frosty and I was wearing thin stockings and a light suit’,13 she recalled on the next occasion they met.

  Some hours after this encounter, Margaret Thatcher realised that her escort had been the man identified at her seminar as a potential future leader of the Soviet Union. So she intensified her efforts to invite him to visit Britain. For reasons of diplomatic protocol, this could only be done through the auspices of a somewhat obscure body, the Anglo-Soviet Parliamentary group chaired by the backbench Tory MP Sir Anthony Kershaw. ‘Who the hell is Mr Gorbachev?’14 demanded Sir Anthony, when asked to issue the invitation. It was accepted with alacrity by the recipient, despite some obstruction from Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister. ‘I had an unpleasant conversation with Gromyko’, Gorbachev recalled. ‘He would not delegate anybody to help prepare the visit, and would not send anyone on the trip with me. He thought the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not need that.’15

  Back in Britain, Margaret Thatcher surprised her Foreign Office advisers by raising the status of Gorbachev’s mission. Instead of the customary short call at No. 10 that was granted to foreign political figures below the rank of head of government, she invited the intriguing Soviet visitor to Chequers for what turned into a five-hour lunch, attended by a galaxy of senior cabinet ministers, officials and Russian experts.

  ‘I knew exactly what she was doing’, recalled Gorbachev. ‘Our intelligence was very active in Britain. We knew that the government was trying to discern what would happen in the Soviet Union after General Secretary Chernenko,** who was not expected to live for long by Margaret Thatcher. She had brought a doctor with her to Andropov’s funeral, and he had diagnosed Chernenko’s shortness of breath as chronic emphysema. This doctor gave her a prognosis on Chernenko’s life expectation which turned out to be remarkably accurate.’16

  Although Gorbachev gives the credit for the arranging of his visit to British intelligence, it was just as much due to Margaret Thatcher’s political and personal intuition. She had sensed that her benefactor at Andropov’s funeral might turn out to be a new kind of Soviet leader, with fresh ideas and a radical outlook. This was the reason she invited him to Britain and to Chequers. He so much exceeded her expectations that the Gorbachev visit became the opening move in a relationship that helped to change the world.

  THE CHEQUERS OVERTURE TO MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

  At 12.30 p.m. on 16 December 1984, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev arrived at Chequers for Sunday lunch with Margaret Thatcher. Charles Powell recalled:

  It was an extraordinary moment. Nobody had much clue what to expect. Gorbachev came to us as a new member of the Politburo. He’d only been to the West before on a visit to Canada. Very intelligently, Mrs Thatcher invited him with his wife – it was a new departure for a Soviet leader to be travelling with his wife – and within seconds of him arriving in the Great Hall of Chequers you knew that this was an entirely different kind of Russian leader. Here was a man bursting with energy, beaming, bouncing on the balls of his feet, obviously proud of his smartly dressed wife, and ready to engage in argument. Everyone present just simply had to change gear.17

  The Prime Minister moved into a gear so high that it became frankness bordering on rudeness. After introducing him to her other British guests, who included six cabinet m
inisters, she decided to set what she thought would be the right tone for the occasion.

  ‘Mr Gorbachev, I want our relationship to get off to a good start’, declared Margaret Thatcher only moments after offering her guest a pre-lunch drink.

  I want there to be no misunderstanding between us. So I must tell you that I hate Communism. I hate it because it brings neither freedom, nor justice, nor prosperity to the people. But if you Russians must have it, then you are entitled to it – secure within your own borders.18

  Bernard Ingham, the No. 10 Press Secretary who was no slouch at blunt speaking himself, witnessed these words and their effect on the Soviet visitor. ‘I saw that Mr Gorbachev was absolutely astounded,’ he recalled, ‘first by Mrs Thatcher’s directness and secondly by her saying that Russians could have Communism behind their own borders.’19

  The frankness did startle Mikhail Gorbachev. He also had few clues of what to expect from this encounter. He had been denied a briefing from the Soviet Foreign Ministry because of jealousy about his trip on the part of the veteran Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko. So he had made his preparations alone with his wife, Raisa Maksimovna,†† at their seaside home in Pitsunda.

  Mrs Gorbacheva looked horrified as she listened to the translation of the Prime Minister’s opening salvo, and her feelings became more hostile after the party had sat down to lunch, with Margaret Thatcher continuing her no-holds-barred style of aggressive interrogation. As Mikhail Gorbachev described the growing tension: ‘We sat down to lunch in the not particularly spacious dining room of Chequers. Margaret and I were on one side of the table, Denis and Raisa on the other. Very quickly the argument between me and Margaret became very heated.’20

  The argument, described by the Prime Minister as ‘a vigorous two-way debate’,21 seemed rather stronger than that to the Gorbachevs. The heat was initially generated by points and counterpoints in a discussion about the merits of the centralised Soviet economic system versus the advantages of the decentralised Western models of free enterprise. From this, the questioning by Margaret Thatcher focused on the high percentage of Soviet government expenditure on military equipment, and became sharper. ‘She was accusing the Soviet Union of all sorts of unfair things’, recalled Gorbachev. ‘I did not accuse Britain of anything. But she became so heated that at one moment she turned away from me. So I turned away from her, too. We were almost back to back.’22

  Reliving the moment in his Moscow office thirty years after the event, in his interview for this biography Mikhail Gorbachev acted out the scene of two offended protagonists turning their backs on each other in high dudgeon.

  He continued:

  Then I caught Raisa’s eye across the table, and her lips moved to say ‘It’s over!’, and for a moment I wondered if we should leave. But then I thought to myself, ‘We are guests here, the conversation must continue’. I said quite firmly to the Prime Minister: ‘Mrs Thatcher, I know you are a person with an acute mind and high personal principles. Please bear in mind that I am the same kind of person.’ She reacted with just a nod, so then I said, ‘Let me assure you that I have not come here with instructions from the Politburo to persuade you to become a member of the Communist Party’.

  Reliving the moment as Mikhail Gorbachev the amateur impressionist, he imitated the sound of Margaret Thatcher bursting into laughter: ‘ “Whoarrhaha!” she cried, and then others laughed too. So the tension was broken, and the discussion continued, although it soon hotted up again but in better ways.’

  A second altercation arose after Gorbachev claimed that under the communist system, citizens of the Soviet Union lived ‘joyfully’. Margaret Thatcher swooped on that assertion by asking, in that case, ‘Why did the Soviet authorities not allow its people to leave the country as easily as they could leave Britain?’23

  This started a lively debate on the prohibitions imposed on Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. Well briefed on this topic by her friend the Chief Rabbi, Margaret Thatcher gave her guest the ‘hair dryer treatment’, with blast after blast of facts and statistics about Moscow’s treatment of the refuseniks. Gorbachev, although unprepared for the vigour of the exchange, came back confidently with the claim that ‘89 per cent’ of those who applied to emigrate from the Soviet Union were allowed to do so. This was not a true statistic. But with a diplomatic politesse that she did not always exhibit, Margaret Thatcher let it pass, not least because Gorbachev added, ‘and we are thinking about that’,24 which she interpreted as a sign that there might be further relaxations in Jewish emigration.

  After lunch the Prime Minister accompanied only by her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, and her interpreter took Mikhail Gorbachev and three of his party to a sitting room for coffee. This private session was scheduled for thirty minutes, but lasted for over two and a half hours. It began with the two principals settling into large armchairs by the fireplace. Margaret Thatcher took off her patent leather shoes, tucked her feet under the chair cushion and pulled some papers out of her handbag. Gorbachev reached for a folder and took out a memorandum headed, ‘On Conversation with Thatcher’. But then he suddenly had second thoughts and asked, ‘Could we do without these papers?’

  ‘Gladly’, replied the Prime Minister, returning her briefing notes to her handbag.25

  The two leaders set off on an unstructured agenda. The first highlight was a passionate plea from Gorbachev for disarmament and an ending of the Cold War. Unaccustomed as she was to not being able to get a word in edgeways, Margaret Thatcher eventually managed to raise one topical symptom of Cold War trouble-making, which was the Soviet funding of the miners’ strike led by Arthur Scargill, then in its tenth month.

  ‘Your trade unions are helping our coal miners with money’, she said. ‘The strike continues. It is doing great damage to the economy of England. For the time being, I take that quite calmly. But I request that your trade unions should cease the financial support, otherwise we will resort to sanctions.’26

  According to his aide, Leonid Zamyatin,‡‡ Gorbachev was visibly taken aback, and said that he had ‘nothing to do with the trade unions’.27

  At this point, ‘Margaret got pretty rowdy’,28 according to Gorbachev, as she claimed that the money going from Moscow’s trade unions to Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers must have had the blessing of the Politburo. ‘No, this is an internal matter’, replied her Soviet visitor. ‘You may be able to direct your trade unions, but we can’t.’ Sparks flew from all directions in the Chequers drawing room on this subject. ‘I think, looking back on it, that both of us were being disingenuous’, was Mikhail Gorbachev’s retrospective opinion. ‘This matter was not a Politburo decision, but the Politburo were aware of it.’29

  The most important area of engagement at this first meeting between the two leaders was arms control. Gorbachev threw himself into this subject, offering his views on disarmament with a passion that sounded both new and sincere. This part of the discussion also became heated and personal. ‘Mrs Thatcher, you are a modern and forward-looking woman leader. Don’t you feel uncomfortable sitting on top of such a huge Western arsenal of nuclear weapons?’ asked Gorbachev, having produced from his pocket a diagram with his own markings in green ink, which illustrated all the millions who would be killed if these weapons were fired.

  The Prime Minister was not going to let her guest get away with such a rhetorical debater’s question. ‘She immediate counter-attacked me. She wouldn’t give an inch. Neither of us allowed the other to get the edge’, was Gorbachev’s version of their argument. ‘But in the end I think we both greatly valued these exchanges.’30

  Margaret Thatcher must have been interested in her guest’s surprisingly sweeping ideas for mutual disarmament, but she did not respond as positively to them as he had hoped. She was aware that the Soviet Union’s leaders were greatly worried by President Reagan’s plans for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). This worry was discernible in the mood music of the conversations at
Chequers. Gorbachev knew that the British Prime Minister had concerns of her own about SDI, on which she differed from Reagan because she did not see this so-called ‘Star Wars’ technology as a means of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, she was determined not to let her Soviet visitor get the faintest impression that there were disagreements on this issue between Washington and London.

  ‘Do not waste my time’, she warned Gorbachev, ‘on trying to persuade me to say to Ron Reagan: “Do not go ahead with SDI. That will get nowhere.”’31

  In fact, nobody’s time was wasted at Chequers on Sunday 16 December. It had been a major breakthrough of diplomatic communication and personal chemistry.

  Charles Powell, the highly overworked note-taker throughout the five hours worth of talks, recalled:

  Gorbachev made an extraordinary impression. He was such a contrast to the succession of Kremlin geriatrics like Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. He talked and argued like a top Western politician. He didn’t need briefs or notes or advisers. He just sat there and slugged it out with her. I think he was using the meeting as an anvil on which he could hammer out his new ideas until they were ‘Thatcher tested’, conscious that she would be a channel to President Reagan.32

  Such a channel was sorely needed, since the Americans and the Soviets were not speaking to each other at the highest levels. Their communications had broken down since President Reagan had given great offence to the Kremlin’s leaders by describing their country as an ‘Evil Empire … the focus of evil in the modern world’.33