Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  The Sunday Telegraph built on this, reporting on 6 July that Howe was threatening to resign if Mrs Thatcher would not impose sanctions after his return from South Africa.125* His commitment to Commonwealth unity was symbolized by his presence at the Commonwealth–Foreign Office cricket match at Blenheim Palace, spreading goodwill. ‘Elspeth [Howe] is batting,’ recorded Peter Marshall, ‘Sonny is fielding & takes 2 catches.’126 Two days later, before setting off on the South African leg of his journey, Howe wrote to Mrs Thatcher to say that:

  The vigour and persistence with which we have continued to make the case against comprehensive sanctions has led [Commonwealth leaders] to conclude, contrary to the Hague understanding, that we have ruled out any move in that direction. This has prompted many of them to see us not just as the sole obstacle to that course, but often as the sole defender of apartheid.127

  ‘This is what worries the Foreign Secretary most,’ Powell glossed for her benefit. Howe urged her that Britain must concede something at the review conference.

  Stories grew of royal anxieties about the future of the Commonwealth and dissatisfaction with Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the issue. Some of this appeared in the press. Laurens van der Post rang Downing Street to say that he had just seen the Prince of Wales, who was ‘very distressed that his mother was being pulled into the current controversy. Prince Charles told Laurens that they (the Royal Family) have never been more united behind you … Far from being critical they have total admiration for your stand.’128 At lunch in Clarence House, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother told Woodrow Wyatt ‘Without prompting … “How disgraceful it is that the press and people are trying to involve the Queen in the row about sanctions” ’.129 She denied any truth in the story that her daughter was at odds with Mrs Thatcher. ‘I suspect’, Wyatt added, ‘she wants me to let Mrs T know the Queen is not against her.’

  These two well-meant private remarks reflected the desire of the Queen to behave correctly and maintain good relations with her prime minister.* There is no known evidence that the two women ever exchanged hard words on the subject. But Buckingham Palace did indeed have different interests from Downing Street in this matter, and was working to promote them. The Queen had – and, in the twenty-first century, still has – a lifelong commitment to maintaining the unity of the Commonwealth. She faithfully followed the view of her father, King George VI, settled with the independence of India in 1947, that ex-colonial republics, as well as ex-colonies which chose to retain the British Crown, could be members. As a result, the Commonwealth became a worldwide and multi-racial institution. It would be tragic for this legacy, Commonwealth supporters believed, if the institution were to break apart over the behaviour of its notorious ex-member, South Africa.

  Accordingly, the Palace did what it could to keep things together – the more so, perhaps, because Sir William Heseltine, only recently promoted to the top job, was himself an Australian, the first non-Briton in the role – and therefore had Commonwealth fellow feeling. Heseltine stayed in close touch with Sonny Ramphal, consulting him about how best to outmanoeuvre Mrs Thatcher.130 Ramphal himself, whom Mrs Thatcher ‘couldn’t stand’,131 took full advantage of the proximity of his offices in Marlborough House to see the Queen quite often. On 23 June, shortly before The Hague summit, he had met her, and afterwards reported to Peter Marshall that ‘it went very well … She will do all she can to help.’132 On 10 July, Powell informed Mrs Thatcher that although the Palace had previously shown ‘not much enthusiasm … for giving any sort of entertainment’ during the review conference, the Queen was now ‘actively considering giving a dinner on the Sunday evening’ (the first day of the meeting).133 According to William Heseltine, said Powell, the ‘change of heart’ had partly taken place because ‘Sonny Ramphal has told the Palace that you were enthusiastic about the idea. I do not recall that.’134 Nor did Mrs Thatcher. She put her disapproving wiggly line under the word ‘enthusiastic’. What had actually happened was that the Queen, almost unprecedentedly breaking her summer stay at Balmoral, had decided to come up to London to save Commonwealth unity.135 This move made life more difficult for Mrs Thatcher than for anyone else.

  On 20 July, the campaign to get Mrs Thatcher to change her mind took a dramatic turn. Under the headline ‘Queen dismayed by “uncaring” Thatcher’, the Sunday Times reported that the rift between monarch and Prime Minister over South Africa and the Commonwealth was indeed real, and went wider. Relying on ‘several briefings by the Queen’s advisers, who were fully aware it would be published’, the paper reported that ‘the Queen considers the Prime Minister’s approach often to be uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.’136 She felt the government should be more ‘caring’ towards the less privileged in society, it went on, feared that as a result of the miners’ strike ‘long-term damage was being done to the country’s social fabric’ and had ‘misgivings’ about the decision to allow American bombers to use British bases to attack Libya. A big news feature inside, entitled ‘The African Queen’, set out how Elizabeth II’s Commonwealth role in that continent was at odds with Mrs Thatcher’s approach. In the view of Sonny Ramphal, who was in a position to know, ‘The story truly reflected the Palace view.’137

  Garland illustrates tension between queen and prime minister over South African sanctions, Daily Telegraph, July 1986.

  As the first copies came off the presses on the Saturday night, Buckingham Palace rushed out a statement, saying that ‘As with all previous prime ministers, The Queen enjoys a relationship of the closest confidentiality with Mrs Thatcher, and reports purporting to be The Queen’s opinion of government policies are entirely without foundation.’ Andrew Neil, the editor of the Sunday Times,* was amazed, since the source for the story (which, by journalistic convention, he could not reveal) was the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea. Neil was so angry at what he considered to be double-dealing that he refused to print the Palace statement in his later editions, a decision which, he afterwards admitted, had probably been a mistake.138

  In fact, the story, though it weakened itself by exaggeration, had foundation. The wording of the Palace statement was not, closely studied, a denial, though it intended to give the impression that it was. Shea had indeed told the Sunday Times most of what it published, and had even had large sections of the full inside story (though not the front page) read to him. What was even more extraordinary was that Shea had already, pre-publication, boasted in private of what he had done. That Saturday, 19 July, was, by chance, the occasion for a meeting at Buckingham Palace of the senior court officials of all the other European monarchies. Its subject for discussion that morning was press handling and PR. ‘Michael Shea’, as Sir William Heseltine recalled, ‘came in to talk and … was so boastful about this wonderful coup that he had with the Sunday Times.’139 Shea felt he had ‘led them to publish a very sympathetic picture of the Queen: concerned about the coal miners and concerned for the Commonwealth’. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Shea ‘came in with his tail between his legs, looking thoroughly abashed, saying there’s a sensational story appearing in the Sunday Times which says there’s a rift between the Prime Minister and the Queen, and Bernard Ingham was in a state of frenzy’.140†

  After frantic discussions, it was agreed between Heseltine and his counterpart at No. 10, Nigel Wicks, that it was pointless for Heseltine to ring Andrew Neil and ask him to kill the story since that would only provoke him to publish ‘with additional relish’. Instead, Heseltine hurried to the Queen at Windsor, where she was about to give drinks to all the European royal court officials. He said to her, ‘You know, this is going to be quite a screaming match and a sensation. I think it might be a good idea if you made personal contact with the Prime Minister.’ This the Queen immediately did, by telephone to Chequers. She told Mrs Thatcher that (in Heseltine’s paraphrase) she ‘could not imagine how the story came to be circulated, and anyway it bears no relation to the truth as I understand it …’ Queen and Prime Minister ‘had a very a
micable conversation’.141

  Many people were naturally disposed to believe the Palace denial (or apparent denial), which was repeated by Heseltine in a letter to The Times. Much anger was hurled at the Sunday Times. But the fact that the story had come from the Queen’s press secretary meant that the paper and its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, were able to stand by it. It was clear to Mrs Thatcher, therefore, that there had been some truth in it. Murdoch informally authorized Woodrow Wyatt, who was, among other things, one of his columnists, to ‘hint’ to Mrs Thatcher who the source had been.142 When he duly rang her, and indicated Shea’s role, she said: ‘Thank you for warning me. I shall know when and where to be careful.’143 Wyatt suggested that, when asked about the story in Parliament, she should say, ‘it’s the silly season.’ But Mrs Thatcher played by the rules, and replied: ‘No … I will say that a denial has been issued from Buckingham Palace and I have nothing further to say.’144

  She stuck to this, even in private. Mrs Thatcher was almost paralysingly correct about relations with the monarch and was never heard to gossip about, complain of or even quote in confidence anything the Queen had told her. After her weekly Tuesday audiences in Buckingham Palace – which, by tradition, never have any officials in attendance – she would emerge, ‘panting for a whisky and soda’,145 to be debriefed by her own and the Queen’s private secretaries. The audiences were rarely very productive, because Mrs Thatcher was nervous. She sat always on the edge of her chair and produced from her bag an agenda from which she launched forth. Far from being, as some docu-dramas and plays have depicted, little speeches in which Mrs Thatcher laid down the law to the Queen, what she said was usually an anodyne recitation of current business. Heseltine once asked the Queen if it was like Queen Victoria’s experience of Gladstone – ‘He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.’ No, said the Queen, ‘It wasn’t at all like that … but I wasn’t given much encouragement to comment on what was said.’146 Mrs Thatcher never had the confidence to make a friend of the Queen, as some of her predecessors had done, and so their relations were ‘absolutely correct and perhaps not very cosy’. In Heseltine’s view, ‘There might have been fault on the Queen’s side,’ for not coming in when Mrs Thatcher drew breath and turning the talk into more of a discussion. Although the relationship between the two private offices was always good, the informal lines of communication between the principals were not.

  So when it became clear that the Queen’s own press secretary had put out a story so damaging to Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister did not have the sort of relaxed relationship with the Queen which could help smooth matters over. She knew what Shea had done, and she had even received sensitive reports about his boastful speech to the conference of royal private secretaries.147 Although Shea – a Scottish social democrat in his views – was blamed for advancing his own political agenda, Mrs Thatcher had a sense that the story would never have reached a newspaper if he had not felt emboldened by those he worked for to put it out.* She felt, in the view of Robin Butler, ‘desperately hurt. She would freeze, as she did over the row about her honorary degree at Oxford [see Chapter 19]. She never said how upset she was.’148 Besides, Mrs Thatcher believed that the Sunday Times story would do her political harm. ‘Those little old ladies will say Mrs Thatcher is upsetting the Queen. I’ll lose votes,’† she told Charles Powell.149 There was also risk the other way round. ‘Does The Queen’s known pro-Commonwealth stand raise problems within the UK?’ Peter Marshall asked himself in his diary,150 and answered his own question, ‘Yes.’ There was strong anti-sanctions feeling in Britain and ‘The Commonwealth had better take note.’151 Certainly the Palace saw the danger in what had happened and became even more politically cautious as a result.

  Sensing Mrs Thatcher’s political vulnerability, Geoffrey Howe saw his moment to press harder against his boss. Charles Powell was aware of this danger, which presented itself in an unusual form. On the previous Saturday, the day on which Shea had made his boast and the Sunday Times had written its story, Mrs Thatcher had been holed up all morning at Chequers with the journalist Graham Turner, who was interviewing her for the following week’s Sunday Telegraph. Turner was a good friend of Mrs Thatcher, sympathetic to her politics, so she spoke very frankly to him, without officials present. By Thursday of the following week, two days before the Sunday Telegraph went to press, Powell alerted Mrs Thatcher. He had read the transcript of the Turner interview. It had alarmed him, and he had tried, via Bernard Ingham, to dissuade the Sunday Telegraph from using its more incendiary passages. But he had failed.* Mrs Thatcher had expressed trenchant views about the Commonwealth and South Africa. It was not the British Commonwealth, she reminded Turner, ‘it is their club. It is their Commonwealth. If they wish to break it up, I think it is absurd.’152 She also pointed out that lots of Commonwealth members were not democracies: ‘Some of them have military governments, some of them have states of emergency, some of them have had censorship at various times, some of them have had terrible internal massacres, some of them have put people in opposition into jail without trial.’153 To the suggestion that her position on sanctions was divisive, she cried, ‘Poppycock!’ She launched into the subject of necklacing: ‘it is one of the things which, faster than anything else, turned my sympathies off any case which some of them might have been putting.’ ‘I am bound to say’, Powell wrote to her, in the restrained language of the loyal adviser, ‘that … the article runs the risk of exposing you to sharp criticism for dealing too vigorously with South African problems at a very sensitive moment’ and also for speaking out when Geoffrey Howe, still in South Africa, is ‘engaged in delicate negotiations’.154

  Steamed up though she was about the issue of South Africa and the Commonwealth, Mrs Thatcher had no difficulty in seeing Powell’s point. She blamed her unguardedness on the fact that the interview, when agreed, had not included the subject of South Africa. ‘By all means try very hard to negotiate the deletions,’ she told Powell, ‘… especially as things have worsened during the last week … Also – later events on Saturday and Sunday [the Sunday Times story] could put a complexion upon it that it was not intended to bear.’155 As Powell reminded her the next day, events had indeed worsened. The review conference would meet in a week’s time with ‘no concrete progress to show on the release of Mandela’.156 She would be outvoted 6:1 on further measures. All she could play for was to delay discussion of these until the Foreign Secretary’s mission was finished at the end of September. ‘This would be a messy outcome but we might just get by.’

  Finding that he could not stop the Sunday Telegraph, Powell thought he should warn Howe, who was in South Africa. He was aware of the growing tension between his boss and her Foreign Secretary. ‘I am not telegraphing the text,’ he cabled, ‘since there is nothing you can do about it … (I realise this may remind you of the Jewish telegram: “start worrying, letter follows”!).’157 The Sunday Telegraph duly went to press with the interview on the evening of Saturday 26 July and was transmitted to Howe in Pretoria. The reply, from Howe’s private secretary who was with him, was full of half-suppressed anguish: ‘although [the interview] contains some positive things, it also contains some material that could not be less helpful.’158 Howe, conscious that his own mission was failing, felt that ‘the focus of the whole exercise … has already extended beyond its original aim of trying to influence the future of South Africa on to the defence of British interests which are increasingly threatened by our Commonwealth partners.’ The Sunday Telegraph interview, he warned, ‘will certainly not diminish that threat’. He had just seen P. W. Botha and found him ‘truculent and totally oblivious of the pressures in the outside world’. He pleaded that Mrs Thatcher should stop attacking ‘the immorality of sanctions’ and instead make clear that Britain had taken measures – ‘a number of recent episodes have jarred with the impression we need to give’; people would think the British government were ‘defenders of apartheid’.

  Strangely, the Sunday Telegraph inter
view did not produce further outcry. Perhaps it seemed a bit stale since it was declaredly conducted before the storm about the Queen and Mrs Thatcher had broken. But the Howe–Thatcher problem was now in some ways more serious than the hostility of the Commonwealth. Powell summed it up pretty frankly, replying to Howe’s office: ‘I have to say that some fundamental differences of assessment clearly remain.’159 Mrs Thatcher’s tactic, he explained, was to ‘lay down a barrage’ of firmness before the review meeting, and keep possible concessions up her sleeve. When a battered Howe returned home and saw Mrs Thatcher about his visit, he told her the United States would soon adopt additional measures and so should Britain.* She told Howe that he had ‘conducted himself with great dignity and patience’, and she agreed that Britain should contemplate further measures if the whole of the EEC would participate, but ‘She remained extremely reluctant to envisage the adoption, let alone recommendation, of further economic measures since she is absolutely convinced sanctions would not achieve internal change. Moreover the government’s strong opposition to sanctions was receiving considerable support in the country.’160 Howe presented her with his paper on the situation for the OD Committee of Cabinet. Powell advised her that it was not too bad, though it was ‘designed to make your colleagues’ flesh creep by describing the Dreadful Consequences should there be no agreement at the Commonwealth Meeting’.161 He urged that the OD meeting be kept low key, because of political danger: ‘I should keep off controversial themes which are bound to lead to argument with the Foreign Secretary, because a. they will provoke the Chancellor [Lawson] and the Home Secretary [Hurd] into supporting him, and b. it will be damaging to have stories of Cabinet/OD disunity.’ She could bide her time: ‘you will have the microphones at the Commonwealth Meeting and say what is necessary, so the most important thing is to avoid being tied down.’ Bernard Ingham, seeking the line to give to the media, put it to Mrs Thatcher with his customary bluntness: