Four years later, she returned to the fray, taking on Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to win a permanent British rebate. This time, if anything, tempers became even more strained. In March 1984 Greece’s Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, declared that as far as most people were concerned, ‘it would be a great relief if Britain left the EEC’. But Mrs Thatcher never wavered. ‘There are nine of them being tiresome and only one of me, and I can cope with nine of them, so they ought to be able to stand one of me,’ she told Panorama. ‘And anyway, they could end the tiresomeness and stubbornness by giving me what I want.’ And in the end, they did.30
The paradox was that Mrs Thatcher was also one of the most pro-European Prime Ministers in British history. If Callaghan had still been Prime Minister, or if Michael Foot had beaten her in 1983, it is hard to believe that Britain would have been more pro-European. And even as Labour promised to pull out, she never wavered in her commitment to the Community. In January 1983 she published a statement to mark the tenth anniversary of Britain’s accession. ‘It is a matter of profound regret to me’, she wrote, ‘that much political energy in our country is still devoted to the hoary question of whether we should be “In” or “Out”.’ As far as she was concerned, that question had been settled for good. Her government was devoted to ‘the unity of Europe as a force for peace, freedom and democracy’. She just had a funny way of showing it, that was all.31
On the face of it, Mrs Thatcher’s commitment to the European Community might seem a bit odd. But, as she saw it, the European project was merely part of the much greater project of Western resistance to international Communism. Not since the days of Churchill and Attlee had Britain had a Prime Minister who was so invested in the Cold War as a moral crusade against a genuinely evil enemy. When she first stood as the Conservative candidate for Dartford in 1951, her election address began like this: ‘Every Conservative desires peace. The threat to peace comes from Communism, which has powerful forces ready to attack anywhere … Britain therefore must be strong, strong in arms, and strong in faith in her own way of life.’ And almost three decades later, as Hugo Young remarked, her rhetoric had not changed at all. ‘Communism never sleeps, never changes its objectives, nor must we,’ she told a Youth for Europe rally in June 1979.fn5 ‘Our first duty to freedom is to defend our own. Then one day we might export a little to those peoples who have to live without it.’32
All Conservatives said they disliked Communism. Few, though, seemed to mean it as much as she did. In 1976 her hostility to the Soviet Union had earned her the ‘Iron Lady’ nickname, coined by the Red Army newspaper after she warned that ‘the Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen’. But this was merely one of a series of extraordinarily bleak warnings she delivered in the late 1970s. Many were written by the historian Robert Conquest, best known for exposing the scale of Stalin’s Great Terror. Conquest undoubtedly encouraged Mrs Thatcher’s belligerence, assuring her that the Kremlin was out to destroy Western democracy. He also encouraged her belief that the West was in headlong retreat, comparing champions of détente with the appeasers of the 1930s. ‘We delude ourselves if we think that our ways, whether they be 200 or 1200 years old, are winning,’ she told an American audience in 1975. ‘At present they are not. We represent a diminishing band of brothers and sisters.’33
In December 1979 Mrs Thatcher paid her first prime ministerial visit to the headquarters of the Western alliance, Washington, DC. At this stage, the White House was occupied by the former Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, with whom she enjoyed a non-existent rapport. Mrs Thatcher liked her foreign counterparts to be charming and worldly, which is why she got on so well with Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand. Carter, however, was a world-class killjoy who did not even serve alcohol to White House guests. He did not much care for her either, and it speaks volumes that his administration consistently referred to her as ‘Margaret R. Thatcher’, despite the fact that her middle name was Hilda. All the same, her trip was a great success, thanks not least to her sabre-rattling militancy. The Soviet Union, she declared, posed a direct ‘military challenge … The time has come when the West – above all Europe and the United States – must begin to substitute action for introspection.’ At a time when Carter was dithering between détente and confrontation, this was hard-hitting stuff, and many Americans were delighted to hear it. The Soviet leaders, she added, ‘have labelled me “the Iron Lady”. They’re quite right – I am.’34
Mrs Thatcher had been back for less than a week when the Cold War took a dramatic twist. While she and Denis were enjoying their first Christmas Day at Chequers, Soviet paratroopers were landing in Afghanistan. Two days later, KGB commandos stormed Kabul’s presidential palace, killing the president and installing a new leader under Soviet protection. On the face of it, there could hardly have been a more dramatic example of the Kremlin’s thirst for expansion. Yet Afghanistan was already a Communist country with a significant Soviet presence, and for months the Kabul government, struggling to suppress a tribal insurgency, had been begging Moscow to send more troops. Far from being desperate to invade, the Kremlin had dithered until the last moment, intervening only when it became obvious that their Afghan clients were incapable of restoring order. And far from being a step towards world domination, therefore, the Soviet invasion was, if anything, a sign of weakness. Indeed, given that the Red Army remained bogged down for nine years, incurring tens of thousands of casualties, the leaders of the West should perhaps have treated it as an unexpected Christmas present.35
But that was not how it looked at the time. Three days after Christmas, Carter telephoned Mrs Thatcher and told her that the Soviet invasion was an ‘extraordinarily grave development’ with ‘profound strategic consequences’. It was essential, he added, that they make it ‘as politically costly as possible to the Soviet Union … I don’t think we can afford to let them get away with this.’ This was Mrs Thatcher’s kind of talk. To her, the invasion vindicated everything she had been saying for years. When an adviser pointed out that the Kremlin had only invaded as an ‘act of desperation’, she brushed him aside. ‘I knew the beast,’ she wrote later. ‘What had happened in Afghanistan was only part of a wider pattern.’ Indeed, in many ways she was relieved, because now the gloves were off. After the invasion, she reflected, ‘the whole tone of international affairs began to change, and for the better. Hard-headed realism and strong defence became the order of the day.’36
The problem, though, was that there was not much the West could do. Even before the invasion, the Americans had been sending aid to Afghanistan’s Islamist rebels, the mujahedeen, but they were not going to beat the Red Army any time soon. So Carter and Thatcher had to fall back on symbolic gestures, and one gesture was more symbolic than any other. In July 1980 the Olympic Games would kick off in Moscow, and within days of the invasion Carter was contemplating an American boycott. Only if the world’s athletes stayed away, he told Mrs Thatcher, would ordinary Russians realize ‘the world’s outrage at Soviet aggression’. She agreed. Two days later, she wrote to Sir Denis Follows, the chairman of the British Olympic Association (BOA), telling him that ‘it would be wrong’ to give the Kremlin such a propaganda opportunity, and urging him to press for an alternative venue. The implication was clear: if the Moscow Games went ahead, British athletes should not go.37
Mrs Thatcher’s bid to frustrate the Moscow Olympics was a very long shot. As early as 3 January, Sir Denis Follows told the press that, as far as he was concerned, British athletes would go to Moscow. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher’s officials advised her that, because of the long-standing tradition of sporting independence, the government could not simply ‘impose its will’ on the BOA. But as her European counterparts already knew, Mrs Thatcher did not give up easily. In the next few weeks she cranked up the pressure, reminding Follows that British athletes had ‘the same responsibilities towards freedom and its maintena
nce as every citizen of the United Kingdom’. But Follows did not give up easily, either. A former secretary of the Football Association, he was about to turn 72 and had weathered plenty of storms before. When an American congressman asked Lord Carrington if there was going to be a British boycott, Carrington asked if he had met Sir Denis Follows. No, the American said. ‘Well,’ said Carrington, ‘he’s made of cement from the tips of his toes to the top of his head.’38
Mrs Thatcher was far from alone in believing that Britain’s athletes should stay away from Moscow. One of the most fervent advocates of a boycott, for example, was the Labour MP Jim Wellbeloved. British participation, Wellbeloved told the Commons, would effectively ‘condone the invasion and the occupation of Afghanistan, the suppression of the dissidents and the treatment of the Soviet Jews’. Both the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, a former tank commander in Normandy, and the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, a former England batsman, agreed with him. It was an ‘illusion’, Runcie said, ‘to suppose that you can separate politics from sport’.
And even before the boycott campaign had got going, the letters pages simmered with outrage. ‘Given Russia’s attitude to human rights, with countless thousands in labour camps,’ wrote Alan Green of Woodford Green, Essex, it would be ‘intolerable’ to join in the ‘flag-waving’ in Moscow. Well before the ‘rape of Afghanistan’, he added, it had been obvious that Moscow would simply be a replay of the ‘infamous Berlin Olympics of 1936’. Another Woodford Green resident, Robert Mitchell, had actually taken part in the Berlin Games, representing Britain at water polo, and remembered ‘the enormous political benefit’ for the Nazis. If the Moscow Games went ahead, he warned, ‘Russian dissidents will be as evident as were German Jews in 1936.’39
Mitchell was not the only former Olympian who thought his successors should take a stand. In a letter to The Times, Stephen Marsh, who had competed in the luge at the 1972 Winter Olympics, conceded that it would be ‘dreadfully hard’ on the athletes to give up on their dreams, ‘yet it is hard for the Afghanis and Cambodians who are being killed in their thousands by Russian-backed troops’. On the same day the paper printed a letter from the former runner Chris Chataway, who had competed in Helsinki in 1952 and had been Conservative MP for Chichester during the Heath years. Now Chataway claimed that the invasion of Afghanistan was ‘the most deadly blow in 30 years to the ultimate survival of democracy’. If British athletes were ‘prepared to assist in an enormous propaganda coup for the Soviet Union’, he thought, ‘the Kremlin, like the Nazi leaders before them, will conclude that there is no will to resist in the free world’.40
But not everybody agreed. The Times’s sports editor, for example, deplored the ‘cynical and unfeeling posturings’ of Britain’s politicians and thought there was ‘no reason why [athletes] alone should make sacrifices’. The Mirror, too, wondered why politicians were not talking about breaking other ‘sporting and cultural links with the Russians’, and pointed out that some of the fiercest champions of the Moscow boycott were those most firmly opposed to boycotting South Africa. Among the general public this argument clearly cut through. By March the Mirror’s sports pages had received hundreds of letters about the boycott, only three of them supporting it. ‘I wish Maggie and her mob would keep their noses out of sport,’ sighed Mrs C. Archbutt of Sydenham, south-east London, while A. W. James of Forest Gate in east London wondered if ‘Mrs Thatcher is guilty of secondary picketing by joining a US boycott of the Moscow Olympics’.41
Even some of the Prime Minister’s natural supporters were uneasy at the thought of ‘bullying’ athletes into abandoning their dreams. In a free country, wrote Enoch Powell in the Sunday Express, ‘the citizen is perfectly free to do what the law does not forbid’. The Daily Express’s normally ferocious George Gale told his readers that it was ‘not up to government to decide whether this man or that, or this team or that, competes here or there or anywhere’. And the Daily Mail was even more damning:
Margaret Thatcher has blundered. Her attempt to deploy state power in order to prevent British athletes from going to Moscow is illiberal, alien and counter-productive … This is a free country … our sportsmen and women must make up their own minds … It is intolerable that this Government, of all Governments – a Government that abhors Communist serfdom – should now seek to make British athletes jump to the Tories’ bidding with what is no more or less than a crack of the totalitarian whip.
To cap it all, even the minister organizing the boycott, Douglas Hurd, thought it was a waste of time. It was, he later remarked, the most ‘deeply foolish’ thing he was ever asked to do as a minister.42
The fundamental flaw in the boycott campaign was that Mrs Thatcher simply did not have the power to make Britain’s athletes stay away. The obvious solution was to apply overwhelming public pressure, but no such pressure materialized. In late January a Newsnight poll found that if the Moscow Games went ahead, only 35 per cent thought British athletes should stay at home, while 58 per cent thought they should go. Almost half agreed that it should be the athletes’ own decision, while only 16 per cent thought it should be up to the government. Indeed, if anything Mrs Thatcher’s campaign made matters worse. Amid allegations of ‘bullying’, a poll in mid-March found that support for the boycott had fallen to just 23 per cent, while 69 per cent thought the athletes should go to Moscow.43
By the spring it was obvious that Mrs Thatcher was flogging a dead horse. Having trained so hard for so long, most athletes were desperate to go to Moscow, and there was nothing the government could do to stop them. And when the BOA held its long-awaited vote on whether a British team should be sent to Moscow, the result was never seriously in doubt. Only four traditionally conservative, cut-glass sports – hockey, shooting, yachting and equestrianism – agreed to honour the boycott, but the others voted to go. ‘Sir Denis Follows and his colleagues are, in effect, collaborating with the Soviet Imperial State,’ shrieked the Express, but by this stage it was too late.44
Among athletes themselves, the episode left a bitter taste in the mouth. Later, the British rowing eight’s cox, Colin Moynihan, a future Sports Minister, recalled his crewmates’ fury at the unfairness of young men and women being asked to give up on the ‘dream for which we had worked throughout our youth’. Moynihan was already a keen Conservative but vehemently opposed the boycott, even though he was sent ‘veiled threats’ that his political career would be finished. The British Weight Lifters’ Association issued a statement deploring what it saw as a smear campaign, while the sprinter Allan Wells claimed that he had been sent ‘six letters from No. 10’. The last, he recalled, included ‘a picture of a young girl sprawled dead on the ground, with a doll lying six inches from the tips of her fingers. It made me so angry I became even more determined to compete.’
As for the British team’s undisputed stars, they had no intention of skipping the Games. When Hurd organized a private meeting with the runner Sebastian Coe’s father, Peter Coe, he was taken aback by the ‘bitterness’ with which Coe senior spoke of the pressure on his son. The supremely dedicated decathlete Daley Thompson, however, never gave Afghanistan the slightest thought. ‘I didn’t really care,’ he said of the boycott. ‘I didn’t give a damn who was going.’45
The Moscow Olympics kicked off on 19 July 1980. With sixty-five nations staying away – including the United States, Canada and West Germany – and only eighty nations taking part, the atmosphere was very far from that of an innocent carnival of sport. The police had blocked major routes into the city, while foreign visitors were outnumbered by men in uniform. Plain-clothes policemen were everywhere: to get into their hotel for dinner, British journalists had to spend at least half an hour filling in forms. As the British Embassy reported, the build-up had been ‘singularly joyless. The continuous rain has not helped. Nor has the fact that Moscow is still half-empty.’ For as the Embassy observed, ‘the oppressive feeling of the city is increased by the virtual absence of children’, since thousand
s of families had been deported to the countryside for the duration of the Games.46
The athletes themselves had other things on their minds. In the end, Britain had sent 149 men and seventy women to Moscow, the largest of all the Western teams. Slightly oddly, the British athletes, like many Western European teams, competed under the Olympic flag to express their disapproval of the occupation of Afghanistan, while the Olympic anthem played during their gold medal ceremonies. Both the BBC and ITV scaled back their coverage, and the latter promised to increase its number of ‘critical programmes about the Soviet bloc’, which made no impact whatsoever. To Mrs Thatcher’s discomfort, however, the Soviet media revelled in the presence of so many British athletes, one Moscow paper even claiming that the British had set an example by forcing ‘a breach in the boycott wall’.47
Did British viewers really care? In the public imagination, the Olympics were memorable less for the fact they were in Moscow than for the triumphs of Britain’s five gold medallists: the swimmer Duncan Goodhew, the sprinter Allan Wells, the middle-distance rivals Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe, and the decathlete Daley Thompson. Given the absence of the Americans and West Germans, this was a pretty feeble haul, and despite the boycott, Great Britain still only finished ninth. The big new star was Thompson, still only 21 but already the best all-round athlete in the world. But not even Thompson’s stroll to victory could match the excitement of the titanic battle between Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe, the two most famous runners on the planet. First, to almost universal surprise, Ovett snatched victory in Coe’s trademark event, the 800 metres. Then, with an estimated 15 million people watching back home, Coe took his revenge in the 1,500, crossing the line with a howl of triumph that became one of the most famous images in sporting history. For sheer drama, there was nothing to touch it.48
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