Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher wrote that ‘this initial response was probably too negative.’41 Certainly, ‘This was not the sort of cable we had expected to get back from Mrs Thatcher,’ recalled Howard Teicher of the NSC staff,42 but her questions did force the Americans to produce answers, and thus to think more clearly about what they were doing: ‘I think it would be fair to say that she did have an influence on the President. He did take her seriously. He did say, “I need her help. I need to make sure I can look her in the eye and say I did everything I could to do what you asked us to do.” ’43 As consultations and US military planning continued, the American deadline drifted.

  But Reagan’s reply to Mrs Thatcher, which she received soon after midnight on 10 April, was firm. He said that, although her concerns were ‘understandable’, the cycle of revenge which she feared had started a long time ago. The lack of a firm Western response, the President wrote, ‘builds up Qadhafi and his prestige’. Contrary to the British view, other Arab governments were content that Libya be punished, and there was ‘ample legal justification’ for such an attack, although he did not mention the issue of self-defence which Mrs Thatcher considered so important. Reagan also answered her request to explain his targets. They would not be economic, and they would be focused on Gaddafi’s ‘primary headquarters and immediate security forces’.44 Then the President made her feel the iron fist in his velvet glove: ‘You should not underestimate the profound effect on the American people if our actions to put a halt to these crimes continue to receive only lukewarm support or no support at all from our closest allies whom we have committed ourselves to defend … we are the only Western power in a position to act decisively. I do not feel I can shrink from this responsibility.’45

  Mrs Thatcher underlined these words and made her decision in the small hours. Charles Powell remembered ‘her coming down exceptionally early in the morning into the private office. She sat in the armchair beside my desk and said, “Charles, I’ve been thinking about this all night. We have to support the Americans on this. That’s what allies are for.” ’46 Powell went into action. ‘The Prime Minister takes the view’, he wrote to Geoffrey Howe’s private office, ‘that the reply [from Reagan] is well argued and leaves no doubt the President is determined to go ahead with military action against Libya. We are not going to deter him; and there is no point in being grudging in the further message which will now be required.’47 In a meeting with Howe and Younger that morning Mrs Thatcher set out this position. Howe grumbled, saying that he ‘remained sceptical whether the action proposed by the President would have the intended effects’,48 but both acquiesced. Without any formal meeting to seek ministerial approval, Mrs Thatcher replied to Reagan, editing out the more querulous tone of an earlier Cabinet Office draft. She said that she was ‘much impressed’ by his case: ‘The main point of this message, therefore, is to assure you that you can count on our unqualified support for action directed against specific Libyan targets demonstrably involved in the conduct and support of terrorist activities.’49 The President replied quickly and gratefully that her offer ‘reaffirms the fundamental strength of the special relationship between our two countries’.50*

  Once the thing was all over, Mrs Thatcher was inclined to lend colour to her own reasoning. When she saw the American arms reductions negotiator Paul Nitze almost two weeks later, she told him that her decision had been governed by her dislike of appeasement. The American view on Libya had ensured that ‘for the first time she understood what Baldwin and Chamberlain had come up against and that she would fight it.’51 It is true that, as Powell put it, ‘Her resistance to terrorism was so powerful, so central to her being and existence, that there were no two ways about it’;52 but at the time, she weighed all the arguments very carefully: ‘What worried her most was the fate of the British hostages in Lebanon. She agonized over it beforehand, because the advice was that they would be bumped off … It was a decision she took, knowing that she could be signing the death warrant of those guys.’53 She also wanted to be quite sure that there was proper justification in international law for any attack. This led her, backed up by the opinion of the Attorney-General, to insist on self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, rather than retaliation, as the legal justification. In the view of Percy Cradock, who was advising her on the subject, the ‘principle of retaliation’ was successfully ‘twisted round’ into that of self-defence.54 Her readiness for strong, even violent action by allies was always heavily qualified by her belief in legality.

  While Mrs Thatcher would not have agreed to Reagan’s request unless she had been satisfied on these points, she was never actively enthusiastic for the attacks on Libya. What really swayed her was her judgment of American attitudes. Once she had worked out that the United States was determined to proceed, she had to decide whether Britain wanted to repeat the row over Grenada, this time without the rhetorical advantage of being able to complain afterwards that she had been kept in the dark. Reagan had consulted her, had reasoned with her and had invoked their overriding common interests. If she had refused to co-operate and he had gone ahead anyway, she would have let him down and exposed for all to see that, on this matter, she had been unable to sway him. She was unhappy, and strongly conscious that neither British public opinion nor her colleagues would be supportive, but she saw that opposition to the attacks was a dead end. She would get a couple of days’ good headlines for ‘standing up to America’, but, in the longer term, gravely weaken the alliance and the relationship on which she had built so much. Officials observing her thought that she had moved weirdly fast from her grave doubts about the attacks to strong support in twenty-four hours. ‘She had completely changed,’ David Goodall recalled,55 as if she had been leant on. She certainly had been leant on, but there is no evidence that she thought Reagan had applied pressure illegitimately. The change was typical of the way Mrs Thatcher usually made decisions. She was all hesitation, doubt and niggling until the moment of decision. Once she had decided, she was adamantine.

  On 12 April, Reagan’s envoy General Vernon Walters called on Mrs Thatcher to discuss US intentions in more detail. Walters remembered Mrs Thatcher as being ‘magnificent’: ‘She said to me, “For forty years you have kept 350,000 of your young men in Europe to help us retain our freedom. How can anyone seriously expect me to say ‘No’ to your request to use the bases in the United Kingdom.” ’56 She may have spoken thus, but the official record paints a markedly different picture. Without withdrawing the support she had promised the President, Mrs Thatcher pushed hard on every issue that worried her. She complained that the US had expanded the President’s ‘reasonably reassuring’ definition of targets: ‘The sort of targets identified by Secretary Shultz would make an attack look like a state of undeclared war. There was no knowing where this would lead. The longest journey started with the shortest step.’57 She reiterated her insistence on self-defence as the justification for any attack; there must be no talk of ‘retaliation, revenge, or reprisal’. So trenchant, indeed, were her remarks that the gist was leaked to The Times – most likely by sources hostile to the American raid – and presented two days later as a story that ‘The Prime Minister is believed to have refused a request from the United States for the use of its F-111 bomber bases in Britain to mount an attack against Libya.’58

  At noon that day, Monday 14 April, the issue was discussed and agreed at the OD Committee of the Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher having decided, on the advice of Robert Armstrong,59 that this smaller and more secure body was more appropriate than the full Cabinet. Mrs Thatcher’s speaking note for the meeting summed up all the problems, but concluded, ‘We have got to stand by them as they stood by us over the Falklands.’60 At 17.20, Downing Street heard that the F-111s would shortly take off from their British bases, and immediately so informed the Queen.

  The planes’ journey was elongated by the refusal of Spain and France (despite President Mitterrand’s private talk of support for anti-Gaddafi operations) to allow ove
r-flight. Powell noted Mrs Thatcher’s contempt for the European allies’ ‘needlessly and deliberately endangering American lives’.61 As the bombers were taking off, she was also facing a political crisis of an almost absurdly different kind – a classic example of the random concatenation of events which makes the office of prime minister so challenging.

  In the Commons that night, the House was debating the controversial Shops Bill, which would have allowed more shops to open on Sundays. This reform had been brewing for several years. In deference to Christian principles, the law had always restricted Sunday trading, but social and technological change had eaten away at this. A mare’s nest of laws now permitted some openings but prevented others. One anomaly, for example, was that it was legal to buy pornography on a Sunday, but not to buy a Bible. There was a move, naturally favoured by the larger retailers, to liberalize and straighten out the rules. Despite her Sabbatarian background as a Methodist girl from Grantham, Mrs Thatcher was in favour. ‘I think this Bill is desirable,’ she wrote about a prototype version four years earlier, ‘and that it would provide more business and possibly more jobs.’62 She persisted in this view even though well aware of what she called ‘a strong alliance in the Commons against it of USDAW [the shopworkers’ union], the Lord’s [Day] Observance Society, and small shopkeepers’.63 A government Bill to implement the changes was framed.

  Among Mrs Thatcher’s advisers, counsels were divided. The free-market beliefs of most of them favoured reform. Business interests, represented to her by the likes of Tim Bell and David Young, and often including contributors to Conservative Party funds, were powerful. On the other hand, Brian Griffiths, in charge of the Policy Unit, and her PPS, Michael Alison, were strong evangelicals, and opposed it. Writing ‘as a churchwarden’, Griffiths told her it would be ‘yet another inducement to loosen family ties’.64 Many of her supporters, he went on,

  welcome your moral stance on economic and social matters. They also feel that our traditional Sunday is part of our Christian heritage as a nation. They therefore find it puzzling, in view of your stand on other issues, that you are prepared to put the weight of the Government behind these proposed changes.

  ‘As the Bill goes through Parliament,’ he concluded, ‘I would expect the opposition to it to grow considerably.’65

  Griffiths knew whereof he spoke because he was close to the main campaigners against the Bill who came together as the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign. It was formally launched, by ill chance, on the day of Michael Heseltine’s resignation, and so attracted no public notice. This lulled the government into a false sense of security. The campaign’s Operation Valentine, centred on St Valentine’s Day, held close to 180 public meetings targeting the constituencies of backbench Conservative MPs, pushing the party’s commitment to what its director, Michael Schluter, called ‘the Judaeo-Christian ethos’.66 Tory MPs began to be impressed by the strength of opposition. By early March, more than 32,000 letters against the Bill had arrived in Downing Street, and a month later petitions against had attracted more than a million signatures. ‘The perceived inflexibility of the Government is now damaging your personal reputation,’ hazarded Hartley Booth from the Policy Unit, adding that ‘The Church in Scotland has come out strongly in favour of changing the law to restrict trading.’67* ‘They would wouldn’t they?’ wrote Mrs Thatcher, in imitation of Mandy Rice-Davies. In Brian Griffiths’s view, ‘She did not really want to know. She thought it was going to happen.’68

  But there was a reputational danger for Mrs Thatcher, partly because the Shops Bill coincided with her wider post-Westland unpopularity and the resistance to selling BL to Americans. Her personal support for the Bill, which was not enthusiastically backed by her doubting Cabinet,* added to the feeling that she was uncaring, that her god was money and even that she was, somehow, unBritish. There was hypocrisy in all this, since the great majority of British people, including churchgoers, shopped on Sunday where and when they could; but then hypocrisy is a permanent British quality which politicians ignore at their peril.69

  About a month before the vote, Michael Alison wrote his boss a long and typically courteous memo, describing himself as a ‘conscientious objector’ and asking to be allowed to abstain. He set out the true nature of opposition to the Bill, and advocated new legislation which would make Sunday ‘special’:

  So many traditional landmarks are slipping away, with ethnic and religious pluralism sweeping in, that a Government decision to legislate to make Sunday different would … be a symbolic reaffirmation of the Christian values of our past … This approach is analogous to keeping the Monarchy afloat, long after its real power has been ceded; indeed, the weaker the Monarchy in real terms, the greater the zeal and affection for it popularly! This accounts, I believe, for the paradoxical upsurge in zeal for Sunday among millions of good, church-going Conservatives who cheerfully shop on Sundays in a limited way.70

  While consenting to Alison’s plea to abstain, Mrs Thatcher’s response to his broader points is not recorded. Her approach to similar criticisms was to listen politely, and on occasion authorize changes in tactics, but press on with the Bill regardless.

  As the night of the vote approached, the revolt grew and the rebels began to feel safety in numbers. Because the contentious nine-hour debate stretched late into the night, Mrs Thatcher worried that the House would still be sitting when news of the Libyan bombing raid broke and feared that she would be called to explain then and there what was going on. She and her staff waited in the Cabinet Room, anxiously checking the ticker tapes for the first reports of the attacks. In the event, the raids were delayed and only began to hit their targets at one in the morning (UK time). The government lost the Sunday Trading Bill by 14 votes. More than seventy Conservatives rebelled, and the absolutely loyal Michael Alison, as permitted by Mrs Thatcher, abstained. This was its first defeat of the Parliament and the only occasion in the whole of her time in office when a government Bill was lost on the second reading. The House then voted to adjourn. The news of the raid had not yet broken, so Mrs Thatcher was spared the need for a late-night statement.

  It being much earlier in the evening in the United States, Reagan broadcast to the nation. The content of this speech had been the subject of considerable lobbying from London. Having convinced herself that military action was justifiable on grounds of self-defence, Mrs Thatcher was determined that Reagan, who often lapsed into talk of retaliation, should choose his words carefully. ‘We were conscious of her insistence that we frame the attacks in terms of self-defence …’ recalled Teicher, ‘so definitely there would have been an impact on how things were framed as a result of her input.’71 Reagan now provided the words Mrs Thatcher needed to hear: ‘Self-defense is not only our right, it is our duty. It is the purpose behind the mission undertaken tonight, a mission fully consistent with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.’72

  At the Cabinet that day, and again on Thursday, ministers were extremely unenthusiastic. Willie Whitelaw said that ‘The young regard Reagan as a dangerous old fool. They are frightened of him.’73 Norman Tebbit, disgruntled by his exclusion from the inner counsels,74 was particularly fierce. He took up Whitelaw’s point, saying that Reagan’s style was ‘OK for Little Rock, Arkansas, but it grates on electors of Ryedale [the Yorkshire constituency, normally a safe Tory seat, where a by-election was imminent].’75 Only Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, talking rather wildly about how his mother had been an American, positively supported the action.76 But because she had already secured OD support, Mrs Thatcher was not in serious political danger from colleagues, and could not be accused of constitutional impropriety. It did little, however, for her already strained relations with Tebbit. ‘This was the only time I can remember Norman getting into a complete rage, which lasted for about a fortnight,’ recalled Andrew Lansley, his private secretary.77 Tebbit’s complaint was that, as party chairman, he needed advance notice of such things to enable him to defend them. At the time, Tebbit recalled, he
was also worried that the permission for the raid would be politically damaging, but, in retrospect, formed the view that ‘she was right: it was not.’78 Certainly the immediate public reaction to British support for the raids was overwhelmingly negative. Stephen Sherbourne informed her that Conservative Central Office had received an ‘unusually large number of calls expressing concern … the biggest reaction since the Falklands’.79 ‘Terrorism thrives on appeasement,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote on the back of this note.