Speaking on the telephone Tom Adams, the Prime Minister of Barbados, told her that ‘It had come as an enormous shock to him to discover that so little was known in London.’115 Mrs Thatcher expressed both her disappointment and her caution. ‘We naturally wondered whether we’d been kept in the dark,’ she told Adams, but ‘Whatever our feelings about the American attitude, the operation was now taking place. We hoped that it would succeed … We wanted to avoid harm to the Alliance.’116 In response to a Foreign Office request that Mrs Thatcher speak to the Prime Minister of Jamaica to calm him down about Britain’s failure to support the invasion, she scribbled: ‘I don’t think a phone call would help at the moment. He is not the only one with strong feelings. Least said soonest mended.’117
In the meantime, though, she was made to feel the embarrassment of her situation. She saw the Queen for her usual weekly audience on 26 October. There is no record of the Queen expressing her views on the invasion at the audience, but Buckingham Palace was mortified by the difficult position in which, as sovereign of Grenada, it put her.118 Apart from anything else, the safety of her representative, the Governor-General, was not assured until 26 October, when he was rescued by US Navy Seals. This news reached London after Mrs Thatcher’s audience. At the time at which she saw the Queen, Scoon could, for all she knew, have been dead. Always extremely correct and rather tense about all dealings with the monarch, Mrs Thatcher was unhappy. Foreign Office officials noted that ‘Mrs Thatcher understood that the Queen was upset and Mrs Thatcher was very disturbed by this.’119 In the course of 25 and 26 October 1983, the full extent of British dismay was conveyed to Reagan. He ‘felt badly about it’, recalled Baker, and was advised to telephone Mrs Thatcher to ‘kiss and make up’.120
Reaching her on 26 October, in the middle of the emergency Commons debate on the invasion, Reagan attempted to disarm the Prime Minister with a line which could have come from one of his 1940s movies. ‘If I were there Margaret,’ he said, ‘I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.’121 ‘There’s no need to do that,’ she replied primly. Reagan attributed his reluctance to consult her earlier to ‘a nagging problem of a loose source, a leak here’, not to any lack of trust in her. Secrecy had been vital, he said. In this Mrs Thatcher appeared to concur: ‘I’m very much aware of sensitivities. The action is underway now and we just hope it will be successful.’ This gave Reagan an opening to assure her that all was ‘going beautifully’ in the operation, though some fighting continued. Then Reagan flattered her: ‘We know that you and through the Queen’s Governor General there – all of us together – can help them get back to that constitution [he used the phrase ‘that constitution’ because he had earlier praised Britain for bequeathing it to Grenada] and a democracy.’ He praised Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica and Tom Adams of Barbados, and, when Mrs Thatcher agreed with him, took this as his cue to draw her further in: ‘They all feel – and dating from the days when they were under the Crown – she [Miss Charles] used the expression: kith and kin. I don’t know if that’s one of our expressions or one of yours.’ ‘It’s one of ours,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘Well,’ said President Reagan gallantly, ‘we still use it here. We still have the heritage …’ He was making a play for her sense of British cultural hegemony. Mrs Thatcher sounded a few warning notes about what might happen next – ‘There’s a lot of work to do yet, Ron … And it will be very tricky’ – but raised no positive objection to anything he said. When he apologized for ‘any embarrassment that we caused you’, she said it was ‘very kind of you to have rung’. When she closed by saying that she must go back to the debate in the Commons, Reagan urged her, ‘Go get ’em. Eat ’em alive.’ ‘Goodbye,’ she replied and hung up rather abruptly.122*
Mrs Thatcher had not yet forgiven Reagan and she was, as usual on the telephone, guarded in her responses. Nonetheless, she was somewhat mollified by what he had said; and he, hearing no renewal of her earlier concerns, was greatly bucked up. Talking to the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, later that day Reagan referred to ‘the pressures coming from England’, but added, ‘I’d be very much surprised if it doesn’t let up.’123 David Goodall told the US Embassy that the President’s call had been ‘ “just the right move”. It had helped assuage the PM’s own feelings, and she had used the information provided to bolster the Cabinet at a critical juncture.’124
The invasion of Grenada was discussed in full Cabinet on Thursday 27 October. Despite her feelings, Mrs Thatcher chose to defend the US against a number of more sceptical colleagues. George Younger,* the Scottish Secretary, backed up by Whitelaw, was unconvinced: ‘Have Americans been straight with us? There must have been something cooked up over the weekend,’ he said. ‘We have been ill served by our allies. We may have no constitutional position, but our Queen is Queen of Grenada.’125 Mrs Thatcher refused to join the chorus: ‘I am not surprised that US told as few people as possible,’ she insisted, and made an effort to understand the American position: ‘They are entitled to see things in a different perspective.’ Her one strong criticism was about the wider effects of the crisis. She feared that the invasion would undermine ‘US/NATO lore that NATO is only defensive’ and that only the Soviets launched military action against independent nations. She thought there was now a greater ‘danger that US pulls out of Europe to concentrate on her own backyard’.126
In Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament that afternoon, Mrs Thatcher maintained her protective public attitude to the United States. ‘We stand by the United States,’ she told Neil Kinnock, ‘and will continue to do so in the larger alliances.’127 She was clearly trying to bury the hatchet.
That was on the Thursday. On the following Sunday (30 October), she dug the hatchet up again and waved it in the air. As a guest on the BBC World Service international phone-in that afternoon, she faced a question from a New Yorker that could have been perfectly designed to provoke her. Americans, he said, were ‘shocked and dismayed at Britain’s implicit support of international terrorism’ in its reaction to the invasion. Given US help over the Falklands, didn’t Mrs Thatcher’s government have a duty to support America now, or at least shut up? Mrs Thatcher could never bear the idea that anyone would think her soft on terrorism. Nor could she tolerate any inaccurate or unfriendly reference to the Falklands War. Off she went: in the Falklands, she said,
Britain went to get its own territory back … That has no parallel whatsoever with Grenada … I am totally and utterly against Communism and terrorism. But … if you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people … there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world. I have always said … that the West has defensive forces in order to defend our own way of life and when things happen in other countries which we don’t like, we don’t just march in.128
It was a classic statement of her approach to armed conflict, national sovereignty and the rule of law, expressed with eloquent clarity.
It was also exasperating for the Americans, because it opened up the whole issue all over again in a highly contentious manner. She was ‘rightfully pissed off but she overreacted’, recalled John Lehman, the Secretary of the Navy; ‘she hit us too hard.’129 ‘Margaret didn’t support us,’ George Shultz recalled. ‘She undercut us, which we didn’t appreciate. She was mad [that is, angry] … She was a big problem.’130 There was a widespread feeling in Washington that she was being ungrateful, given US support over the Falklands. Bud McFarlane duly fired off a cable of protest to the Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong. Britain’s public reaction to the invasion had ‘caused us profound disappointment’, McFarlane declared, singling out Mrs Thatcher’s remarks about marching into other countries as ‘unusually harsh’. ‘The infliction of such public criticism by one of our closest allies’ after the ‘national anguish’ caused by the Beirut bombing was ‘doubly wounding’.131 His complaint, he explained, was not about private differences, but about public ones which
‘only serve to diminish British–American solidarity which has served our mutual interests so well’. He was sending this message, he said, to ‘clear the air’ and appeal for British support.
Strongly worded as this message was, the final draft had been toned down several notches. An earlier draft had been more personal, suggesting that Mrs Thatcher’s attitude had put at risk ‘the solidarity which our respective heads of state have worked so hard to foster’.132 Underlying McFarlane’s message was a sense, not directly stated, that Mrs Thatcher had personally endangered her relationship with President Reagan by what she had said in public.
Armstrong sent Mrs Thatcher a copy of his proposed reply to McFarlane, which put the British counter-case in more restrained language. Mrs Thatcher disliked his tone of compromise, Armstrong was told: ‘Mrs. Thatcher does not wish to give the impression that we were grateful for the advance notice of the Grenada operation (which she considered quite inadequate) nor that our views, private or public, would have been different if we had had more time or more knowledge.’133 He was instructed to redraft his reply to make it less conciliatory.
Why was Mrs Thatcher so annoyed, and more so as time passed than she had been at first? Normal explanations must play a part. In early November a Sunday Times poll suggested that a little over a third of those asked believed she was good in a crisis, down from almost two-thirds before the Grenada episode.134 The press and Opposition jibes that she was the humiliated poodle of the President obviously had to be countered. So did media attempts to drive a wedge between herself and Geoffrey Howe on the issue. She had suffered a week of bad headlines, and both experience and temperament told her that the best form of defence is attack. She also believed in the justice of her case against the invasion. But to understand the depth of her feeling about Grenada, one must look more at Mrs Thatcher’s character, and perhaps her sex, than at the details of the issue itself.
Ever since Ronald Reagan had become president at the beginning of 1981, Mrs Thatcher had tried to forge an unbreakable friendship between the United States and Britain, based on common beliefs, common threats, common interests, and personal affection and trust. She had succeeded beyond expectation. When she had visited Washington in September 1983, following her second election victory that summer, she had been royally received. She was confident that INF deployment, for which she had taken so many risks, would go ahead in November. She liked Reagan for his gentlemanly charm, his courtesy to her as a woman, but above all because he inspired her trust. In her mind, there was no greater virtue than trust.
As she contemplated the saga of Grenada, a short month after her Washington triumph, she could not avoid the conclusion that the President had betrayed this trust. At first, she preferred to think that the trouble had come from his underlings, but, in the face of repeated evidence, she could not excuse him from blame. A full account from Robin Renwick entitled ‘ “Consultation” with the Americans about Grenada’135 had reached her on 28 October, after her call from Reagan and before her World Service broadcast. It reiterated that a promise to consult had been given, and broken. It concluded that Reagan had more or less decided to invade as early as the morning of 22 October. In these circumstances, she considered Reagan’s cables and the flattering words of his post-invasion telephone call dishonest. His emollient call had, one might say, rubbed sugar in her wounds, which was not much more healing than salt.
And so Mrs Thatcher, who, despite her great professionalism, always invested strong personal feeling in her relationships, and was susceptible to charming, well-dressed men who flattered her, was as disappointed as a two-timed girlfriend. ‘My relations with President Reagan will never be the same again,’ she told a senior official.136 She felt she had been made a fool of. For a proud woman who had a slightly old-fashioned view of the relations between the sexes, this experience was even more mortifying than it would have been for most men. In this sense, her outburst on the World Service was uncalculated, a natural expression of pique and anger. One might conjecture that President Reagan, also fulfilling the stereotype of his sex, felt as deflated as does any professional charmer when his arts fail. It was surprising – and lucky for both sides – that the press did not pursue this rift much further. It had the potential to do real harm.
From the BBC World Service phone-in onwards, the bureaucracies of both countries struggled to get the relationship back on track. It was arranged that Kenneth Dam, the Deputy Secretary of State, would call on Mrs Thatcher for breakfast at Chequers on 7 November 1983. From the moment he arrived, Dam found her ‘highly agitated about Grenada’.137 He recalled: ‘She invited me immediately after shaking hands to go to a sideboard where she took a grapefruit and I, in American fashion, chose some orange juice. She demanded to know why I had not taken grapefruit. The only thing I could say was that I preferred orange juice. She seemed displeased …’138 Mrs Thatcher then launched into what Dam considered a tirade about Grenada, starting with the provocative question ‘whether Grenada was unique or a replay of the Monroe Doctrine and Bay of Pigs that portended further similar moves’139 in, for example, Nicaragua. The British official record largely confirms this, and shows Dam inserting the odd word of apology and polite, downplayed disagreement. Mrs Thatcher spent an hour and forty minutes venting her irritation about not only Grenada, but also INF deployment, Lebanon and possible American support for the supply of arms to Argentina.140
In Dam’s view, the conversation ‘ended on a very cordial note. She had just been blowing off a huge head of steam.’141 Others were not so sure. Edward Streator, Chargé d’Affaires at the US Embassy in London, warned Washington of ‘mounting problems with Thatcher’142 and intervened informally with Howe and Carrington to ‘try and persuade Mrs Thatcher to cool it’.143 In her Mansion House speech on 14 November, Mrs Thatcher was prevailed upon to reiterate Alliance solidarity – ‘it is the strength and resolution of the Western alliance which keeps the peace today’ – but she remained grumpy, and was curiously unimpressed by the argument, which Dam had put to her, that polls showed 91 per cent of the people on Grenada pleased with the invasion.* As late as early December, Vice-President Bush, who had been ‘inundated with pleas from the Brits to repair the schism’,144 wrote to Mrs Thatcher to say, ‘I wish we could sit down and chat because I have been troubled by recent tensions and I know it hasn’t been easy for you either.’145
It was the historian Hugh Thomas,† her informal and occasional adviser on foreign policy, who provided the most thoughtful summary of her problem, parts of which Mrs Thatcher underlined. Thanking her for dinner on 14 December 1983, Thomas wrote that he had found ‘one part of our conversation disturbing. That related to yr. current view of the U.S.’146 He counselled against ‘drawing up a general indictment’ of the US administration on the basis of Grenada ‘unless there is some alternative general underpinning of our foreign policy with which you wish to experiment’. She herself had ruled out greater European defence collaboration, he wrote, so what alternative was there? There should therefore be ‘a considered attempt to mend our fences with the US’, and a clear preference for Reagan re-elected over any Democrat alternative. She should try to ‘make a new start’ after Christmas:
You have such a fine reputation over there. Those of us who look to you to provide us with the kind of direction that de Gaulle gave France have always pointed out that yr strength, in comparison with the general, is that you do accept the essential part that the US has had since 1945. All US officials & politicians … except you from their general moans about European defeatism. You can surely rebuild on the basis of those facts.147
This letter was well expressed because, in the de Gaulle comparison, it played on Mrs Thatcher’s temptation to define her national leadership by cutting loose from America – only in order to dismiss it. Under political pressure from the likes of Enoch Powell* and David Owen, she was worried that others might play the patriotism card better than herself, and she was still smarting from being, as she saw it, let down
. She may briefly have harboured illusions, post-Falklands, that Britain could behave like Gaullist France, almost defining itself by independence from the United States. Thomas’s words were accurately judged to remind her that a British version of Gaullism could work only if it were essentially pro-American. Although she would never admit that she had gone too far in her wrath over Grenada, she secretly knew that Thomas’s argument was right.
Mrs Thatcher also understood perfectly well the significance of the fact that INF deployment had begun, as planned, by the end of November 1983. It was a triumph for the Western Alliance; but it also caused the Russians to walk out of the INF talks in Geneva, increasing East–West tension. She recognized both her own success and the accompanying need to look for dialogue. It was in this spirit that she began 1984.
6
The enemy within
‘If anyone has won, it has been the miners who stayed at work’
In her first term, Mrs Thatcher had tried to avoid direct confrontations with the trade unions. Her approach had been to change the law ‘step by step’ in order to reduce their legal immunities, rather than go to war. In her second term, while she remained tactically cautious, she began to believe she could actually win, and so was readier to fight. She was readier for full-scale contests with public sector and nationalized industry trade unions which would test both the strength of her new labour laws and the political mettle of her government. In the case of the National Union of Mineworkers, she had every reason to see such a contest as almost inevitable. The ground for her first confrontation, however, was not central to her battle to overcome industrial chaos. It concerned trade union power in a separate area, but one close to her heart – national security.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 18