Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  MacGregor’s ambitions accorded with Mrs Thatcher’s ideology, which feared exclusive reliance on rail because it was both nationalized and wholly unionized, and preferred the freedom of the road and the power of the private sector. He was so well connected that he could personally lobby numerous Cabinet ministers. He also dangled the idea that Euroroute would create work for British Steel – ‘approximately 250,000 man years of employment’ over five years, he claimed.30 But the prevailing view of the Departments of Transport and of Industry was that a pure rail link was better. In addition, the new French Socialist-led coalition government, whose Transport Minister, Charles Fiterman, was a real, live Communist, demanded a ‘political cancellation’ arrangement by which each government, once signed up to endorse a scheme, would be liable if it backed out. Mrs Thatcher’s free-market guru Alan Walters, who was a transport economist and disliked railways, warned her that the public’s ‘growing expectations about the Chunnel/Brunnel [part-bridge, part-tunnel]’ were worrying.31 A rail tunnel would require unacceptable government guarantees, so the government should not allow people to get the impression that it might give them. The Trade Secretary, John Biffen, reminded colleagues of the vast losses made on the Anglo-French Concorde aeroplane and the danger of being ‘generally at the mercy of the French’.32

  Mrs Thatcher was cautious, but because of Mitterrand’s helpful attitude during the Falklands War, she agreed with the Foreign Office line that Britain should find ‘a way of keeping the French in play and out of mischief’.33 So when she saw Mitterrand’s Prime Minister, Pierre Mauroy,* in Edinburgh in May 1982 and he expounded his Channel vision, she agreed with him: ‘She too harboured a dream of a fixed link.’† But she made no commitment of public money and added that ‘she did not think [private] finances would be available for a rail link alone.’34 It was up to the private sector to come up with interesting suggestions: when they had done so, the government would decide which scheme would be its best ‘chosen instrument’. Politically, the matter then went quiet for eighteen months. At the 1983 general election, it suited the Conservatives, who had several Kent seats whose residents did not want the noise and bother of a Channel tunnel, to play the issue down. Nicholas Ridley, whom Mrs Thatcher made transport secretary in October 1983, was a tunnel sceptic, especially if the spending of public money was involved.

  Early in 1984, Gow again asked Mrs Thatcher to see MacGregor, who was still pushing forward with his EuroRoute scheme. This meeting was partly a cover so that Mrs Thatcher and MacGregor could talk about the coming miners’ strike without being seen to do so (see Chapter 6), but it was also an opportunity for him to attach the appeal of his project to the political preoccupation of the hour. Rail-only tunnels, he told Mrs Thatcher, ‘would perpetuate and even enhance the monopoly power of rail unions on both sides of the Channel’. Rail unions were much on her mind, because there was a threat that they might come out in solidarity with the striking miners.35 Although Mrs Thatcher continued to prefer a road element to a conventional rail link, she still did not give MacGregor her endorsement. Her Policy Unit advised her that the fixed link was in the category of ‘would be nice’ rather than ‘must have’,36 and was therefore a matter for the private sector alone.

  The situation, however, was unsatisfactory and gave rise to a private–public Catch-22. Several private promoters were now ready and eager to push their case, but could not do so without any government lead. The French wanted to move forward. The British did not want to be blamed for delay. President Mitterrand came to Britain for a state visit in October 1984 and mischievously told a press conference that he and Mrs Thatcher had discussed the Channel project ‘all the time’ during his visit and that it was her ‘obsession’.37 This tease pushed Mrs Thatcher towards action: she did not want to deny that she supported the project. Mitterrand was also conscious that she was coming to see him a month later for the Anglo-French summit in Paris.

  These two occasions for the leaders to meet forced the government to think harder about what it really desired. Nicholas Ridley, who was off to see his French counterpart, wanted a steer from Downing Street. Even now, though, he did not really get one. Mrs Thatcher followed the advice of her Policy Unit and told Ridley that he should simply reiterate the ‘existing position without sounding either bullish or bearish’.38 The government was terrified it would have to end up supporting bids with public money. There was always a fear that a Channel fixed link could end up being the largest white elephant ever imposed on the British Exchequer.

  After Mrs Thatcher’s summit dinner with Mitterrand on 29 November 1984, Mrs Thatcher gathered ministers and officials in the British Ambassador’s residence in Paris for drinks. Perhaps intoxicated by Mitterrand’s Gallic charm towards women, for which he was famed, Mrs Thatcher suddenly became animated about the fixed link. She seemed to share the President’s love of grands projets. ‘It would be nice to have something exciting getting under way,’ she said.39 In her view, ‘exciting’ meant a scheme involving road: the alternatives did not interest her. ‘I don’t want the rail tunnel,’ she declared, ‘I want EuroRoute,’40 as did Mitterrand. Bernard Ingham, who was present, was amazed by Mrs Thatcher’s new-found enthusiasm for something about which she had for so long been so hesitant: ‘I passed a note to Robin Butler which said: “When did this conversion on the road to Damascus take place?” “About 17 minutes ago,” Robin replied. Mitterrand really did flirt with her.’41 The following day, the two leaders announced their amity on the fixed link (though without stating which scheme), and promised to pursue the project with ‘real urgency’.42 Mrs Thatcher conveyed her excitement to the BBC: ‘many people have a great dream that they would like to get in their car at Dover and drive all the way through to Calais.’ In a separate BBC interview, she said that such a European link would ‘make us confident in the future and as forward-looking as some of those of our forbears [sic] who built the first industrial revolution’.43

  Despite Mrs Thatcher’s new-found zeal, her vision did not, in fact, prevail. As John Wybrew in the Policy Unit complained to her, ‘Ironically, the French team [the Socialist government] are embracing the positive spirit of the Thatcherite private enterprise formula … with more inspiration and enthusiasm than the British.’44 Britain, not France, was the problem: there were ‘too many hang-ups about rabies, plant health and terrorists’.* The project was now almost certain to go forward – the ‘Invitation to Promoters’ was issued in April 1985 – but the institutional forces in favour of a rail link were stronger and wilier. Sir Nicholas Henderson, hero of British diplomacy with the United States during the Falklands War and a former ambassador in Paris, was chairman of the Channel Tunnel Group which, with its French partner, Trans-Manche, was bidding for a rail tunnel. ‘I am concerned’, he wrote silkily to Mrs Thatcher, ‘by the extent to which your views are being taken for granted … When I was in Paris recently I was told in the Prime Minister’s office … that it was assumed in France that the British Prime Minister was in favour of EuroRoute.’45 Could he come and see her? And by the way, his company could even offer a drive-through tunnel in addition to the rail one they had already planned.

  It was Bernard Ingham who detected and neatly encapsulated which way things were going. The Cabinet committee set up to consider the different Channel ‘fixed link’ projects, he wrote to Mrs Thatcher, ‘fails to address itself to which side of the road vehicles would drive. This may be a significant pointer to the ultimate choice.’46 He meant that if the committee was not thinking about whether cars would drive through on the left- or right-hand side this was because it wanted a rail-only tunnel.

  In November, four plans were submitted, including those of EuroRoute and the Channel Tunnel Group. An effective deadline for decision was set by the fact that Mrs Thatcher and Mitterrand had agreed to meet in Lille on 20 January 1986 for a ceremony to announce their ‘chosen instrument’ for the project. Despite considerable pressures, Mrs Thatcher followed Charles Powell’s advice that she must st
and aside from the process of selection in order to avoid ‘later accusations of trying to manipulate the outcome’,47 although Mitterrand, through a private intermediary, urged her to weigh in in favour of EuroRoute.48 The Policy Unit thought the same way. ‘Put your vision of what Europe is capable of achieving to the test,’ urged John Wybrew. ‘Challenge the private sector to undertake the EuroRoute scheme.’49 She did not.

  After much toing and froing, the decision was made for the bored-tunnel scheme of the Channel Tunnel Group/Trans-Manche. As Nicko Henderson had calculated, the vague offer of an eventual road tunnel in addition to the rail one made it much easier for everyone to accept. Mrs Thatcher’s enthusiasm for MacGregor’s more dashing idea had been overcome by her persistent caution about money, and the Channel Tunnel Group’s superior acquaintance with the corridors of power on both sides of the Channel. It was all rather a rush. Charles Powell brought back from the ceremony at Lille a piece of paper on which he had written out:

  This – believe it or not – is a historic document. It is the PM’s statement announcing the choice of the Channel Tunnel Fixed Link project … please file:

  THE UNITED KINGDOM AND FRANCE HAVE DECIDED TODAY, ON THE BASIS OF A REPORT BY EXPERTS, TO LINK THEIR TWO COUNTRIES BY A TWIN-BORE TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL FOR RAIL TRAFFIC AND MOTOR VEHICLE SHUTTLE TRAINS.

  LATER A DRIVE-THROUGH LINK SHOULD BE BUILT.50

  On this scrap of paper, François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher had appended their signatures.

  The following month, on 12 February, Mrs Thatcher greeted Mitterrand at Manston airport in Kent and drove with him to Canterbury. ‘He kept staring at her legs in the car,’ recalled her detective, Barry Strevens.51 They signed a treaty to formalize the deal in the Chapter House of the Cathedral. Thirty years on, the Channel Tunnel is extremely popular, although the high-speed rail link eventually installed had to be paid for by government, not the private sector. Of the drive-through link, there is no sign.

  Through collaboration with a French socialist government, Mrs Thatcher had succeeded in bringing Britain and the Continent much closer, physically, than ever before. For all this, she remained uneasy about the future direction of the European Community. She did, at this stage, believe in the Community as an embodiment of Western democracy and an aid to peace in Europe. She was therefore pleased that Spain and Portugal, which had sloughed off dictatorships in the 1970s, were to be permitted to join (at the beginning of 1986). She did have an agenda of bringing Thatcherite freedoms and disciplines to the economic affairs of the EEC. In particular, she wanted what the British still usually called the ‘Common Market’, but was now being rechristened the Single Market,* to live up to its name. But she was scarred by the experience of European Councils over five years, and had developed almost measureless contempt for their endless dinners: ‘It all proved so bloody difficult that it did sour her.’52 ‘These men!’ she exclaimed to Bernard Ingham after attending the formal dinner at Fontainebleau. ‘All they do is anecdote away. Never get down to business. So unbusinesslike!’53† Mrs Thatcher’s Continental counterparts felt similarly annoyed. The fight had often been so fierce that it had permanently bruised them: ‘in the process, she had alienated the others.’54 ‘These men’ were fed up with ‘that woman’.

  Mrs Thatcher was already anxious about the different way in which her main European partners saw the future of the Community. Her Foreign Office brief for her meeting with Kohl a few weeks before the Council in Brussels in March 1984 had suggested that she argue ‘There cannot be a Renaissance without a Reformation.’55 This was not terribly good history – the Renaissance began long before the Reformation – but, for Mrs Thatcher, there was a further doubt. She certainly wanted a Reformation – the breaking down of bureaucracy, protectionism, the state direction of the economy, inefficiency and cronyism – but did she actually want the sort of Renaissance that gleamed in the eyes of all these foreigners? Her failure to share the deep emotions which underlay the drive for European Union is illustrated by a vignette three months after Fontainebleau. On 22 September 1984, on the field of the terrible First World War battle of Verdun, Kohl and Mitterrand stood together, hand in hand, to symbolize the reconciliation of France and Germany. Mrs Thatcher watched it on television. Wasn’t it moving, she was privately asked afterwards? ‘No, it was not,’ she answered. ‘Two grown men holding hands!’56 She was often in favour of EEC developments, but she never shared the religion of Europeanism.

  Like all religions, Europeanism needed its dogma. And Mrs Thatcher often found herself with little option but to accept the expansive language favoured by her European partners. The ‘Solemn Declaration’ that Mrs Thatcher had agreed to during the European Council at Stuttgart in June 1983 (see Chapter 4) provides a classic case of how the cause of European integration advanced despite Mrs Thatcher’s resistance at every point.

  The Declaration arose from the so-called Genscher–Colombo Plan of 1981, in which the foreign ministers of Germany and Italy had argued for greater European political integration, laying the ground for the creation of a European state and calling for a ‘European Act’ to advance it. In November 1981, the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, wrote to Mrs Thatcher soothingly to say that Genscher–Colombo would not need parliamentary ratification, because it was not a treaty. ‘A tactical point,’ he added: ‘Our overriding aim in Europe at the moment is a satisfactory outcome on the Community Budget. For this, we need German cooperation. We shall find it easier to persuade our partners to make the substantial moves we need from them if we can provide them with evidence of simultaneous progress on the wider, vaguer and more theological issues addressed in the German proposals.’57 Mrs Thatcher wrote uneasily on the note, ‘We can’t get away with this without reference to Parliament,’ and added, ‘This will reopen all the old wounds in the Tory Party and create another split. We just can’t do it.’58

  But do it they did. In February 1983, Carrington’s replacement, Francis Pym, wrote to Mrs Thatcher encouraging her to sign up to the Genscher–Colombo proposals at the forthcoming European Council. Her private secretary, John Coles, deployed the classic line of tactics over long-term view in Pym’s support: ‘I do not think it will do any harm to sign this verbose document and Kohl will be upset if we make difficulties.’ Mrs Thatcher wrote: ‘I dislike it intensely.’59 Three days later, she wrote, ‘Do we have to sign it. Can’t we just adopt it. It is a dreadful document.’60 At the end of the month, Pym insisted that Britain would be isolated if she resisted signing. Like Carrington, he argued the tactical course: ‘The appearance of the document will doubtless prompt some discussion but I do not think we should have much trouble in demonstrating that it has little real content.’61 And he followed this up with a magnificent piece of King Charles Street ingenuity: ‘If, on the other hand, we were to refuse to sign, we would run the risk of appearing to attach more credibility to the document than it either warrants or deserves.’62 In other words, Britain should sign in order not to attach credibility to the document. ‘Do you agree to sign?’ a private secretary wrote on Pym’s letter. ‘Yes,’ wrote an exhausted Mrs Thatcher.

  British officials tried to reassure Mrs Thatcher that a Declaration – even a Solemn one – was much less than an Act. They were proud of a form of words in the Declaration which described European unity as a ‘process’ rather than a ‘destination’ point;63 but its overall effect went strongly against Britain’s pragmatic and modest approach. By it, the Community was committed to ‘Strengthening of the European Monetary System … as a key element in progress towards Economic and Monetary Union’ and to decide within five years ‘whether the progress achieved should be incorporated in a Treaty on European Union’. Mrs Thatcher was almost always advised that what officials characterized as the ‘windy rhetoric’ or ‘theology’ of European declarations was worth putting up with in order to secure concrete advantages. Sometimes this was good advice, but the trouble was that the windy rhetoric usually meant something important to th
e men who uttered it. Theology always matters to a priesthood. The high priests of Europe would be sure – quite reasonably from their point of view – to use it later. That happened in this case: what was conceived by Genscher–Colombo in 1981 and solemnly declared at Stuttgart in 1983 would be framed as a treaty obligation at Luxembourg in 1985, included in the Single European Act of 1986, set in train at Hanover in 1988, confirmed at Madrid in 1989 and Rome in 1990, and implemented in the treaty which followed after the Maastricht Intergovernmental Conference of 1991. Because the builders of Europe saw the EEC as a continuous progress in one direction, they used each treaty, declaration, protocol, directive and so on as the building block for the next. Mrs Thatcher was very suspicious of this, both as a method of proceeding and because of the nature of the goals. But she was also trapped in it: it was a condition of membership.

  There was a strong contrast in underlying attitudes, if not in explicit philosophy, between Mrs Thatcher and her European colleagues. In May 1984, for example, after visiting Mrs Thatcher at Chequers, Helmut Kohl delivered the Konrad Adenauer Memorial Lecture in Oxford. There he argued that European integration must be ‘irreversible’ and asked, ‘Are all members prepared to work for the political union of Europe?’, a question which implicitly challenged Oxford’s most famous living female graduate. Mrs Thatcher was never committed to political union – as opposed to political co-operation – indeed she was adamantly opposed to it. Her way of putting this tended to have a guise of pragmatism, but underneath her views were hard: ‘I do wish someone would define it [political union] first …’ she told Die Welt in October 1984. ‘I do not know what European political union means … I do not believe that we shall have or can have a United States of Europe.’64 She could hardly comprehend the federalist ambition: ‘It simply did not occur to me that they would want to bury the Mother of Parliaments in a United States of Europe.’65 Her own thoughts about the EEC were limited, caustic and practical. Their flavour can be tasted not only in her own comments, but in those provided to her by Charles Powell. Powell, though seconded from the Foreign Office, was always clear that in his job as private secretary he owed loyalty to her alone. He therefore almost always projected, and even sometimes hardened, her view of the world in his communications, and relished it when she clashed with departmental orthodoxies. He often sent her sarcastic notes about European affairs to stir her up. One, entitled ‘59 New Regulations in 1984’, mockingly mentioned ‘sewage sludge in agriculture’, ‘the market in goatmeat’ and laws on ‘Boat Fittings’. ‘They’ll try to Harmonise Nursery Rhymes next!’ he added.66