Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  – Is the Lady for turning; and, if not

  – will the Commonwealth crack up?162

  It was Ingham, apparently, who caused Geoffrey Howe to snap. Howe’s correct understanding of the OD meeting of 31 July, which passed off without incident, was that ministers had agreed to support further measures by the European Community. After the meeting concluded, however, it was reported to him that Ingham was briefing the lobby that the government was ‘not in the business of further sanctions’.163 Ingham told the lobby – so Howe believed – that Howe’s promise of likely further measures in a statement to the House two weeks earlier was ‘an albatross’. He predicted ‘emotional outbursts from Kaunda, Mugabe and company’ and would not mind if the review conference were to ‘break up’. Unsourced rumours also circulated that Howe was about to resign. Urged on by Elspeth,164 he sat down and wrote to Mrs Thatcher, producing drafts with the help of his PPS, Richard Ryder. It was a long and rather agonized letter, which he considered ‘very important’.165 He reprinted it in full in his memoirs.166

  Howe set out how Ingham had behaved and how this might prejudice the review conference. But it was his last point which was, he said, ‘more fundamental’. Although it was expressed as a criticism of Ingham, it was clearly directed at the principal as well as the messenger. ‘We have worked together closely, and I like to think successfully, for more than 11 years.’ He wanted to continue doing so and help win the next election. ‘That means that we must continue to have confidence in each other: the partnership – for example, this weekend – is too close to survive without that.’ It could not survive if the No. 10 press secretary set ‘Minister against Minister’, ‘undermining our chances of securing a third term’ and destroying ‘what should still be the party’s secret weapon’ (loyalty). This must be tackled – though not during that fraught review-conference weekend – ‘if we are to continue working together in confidence … I hope we may be able to find a chance to talk about it.’ Mrs Thatcher chose to see this neither as a threat nor as a plea, but as a slightly cowardly attempt to get her loyal press secretary sacked. In the margins of pre-conference meetings, Howe raised it briefly with Mrs Thatcher, but she replied: ‘Bernard isn’t like that. But we can’t talk about it now.’167 In her own memoirs, she made no mention of Howe’s demarche.* Howe had got close to Michael Heseltine’s situation over Westland. There can be no doubt that, if he had chosen to resign, the damage done to Mrs Thatcher at this point would have been much greater. He was much more central than Heseltine to the whole Thatcher project, and was more widely respected as a calm and moderate person, with more allies in the party. Coming at a time when, for quite separate reasons, Mrs Thatcher was at loggerheads with Norman Tebbit (see Chapter 15), this row put her in some real danger. She was lucky that little of this became public, and lucky too that her Foreign Secretary was both too loyal and too infirm of purpose to press his point home.

  On Saturday 2 August, the Thatchers visited the Commonwealth Games ‘village’ in Edinburgh, occupied by athletes of those countries (twenty-seven out of fifty-nine) which had not boycotted the games in protest at Britain’s line on South African sanctions.† They were met with grumbles and a few catcalls. ‘I did not disagree with Denis’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘when he remarked that this was “one of the most poisonous visits” we had ever made. It was a relief to dine that evening with my good friend Laurens van der Post who talks good sense about South Africa …’168 She particularly resented the idea that Britain had to keep the games going and therefore to give concessions to save them. When Sonny Ramphal told her, ‘Prime Minister, these are your games that are being spoilt,’ Mrs Thatcher replied, ‘No, Mr Secretary-General. They are not my games. These are your games.’169 She was intensely irritated by the whole rigmarole of the Commonwealth – its combination of institutionalized anti-Britishness with riding on the coat-tails of British imperial prestige, its self-importance, and the complications caused by the involvement of the Queen. On the first night of the review conference, the seven leaders present, including Mrs Thatcher, plus Ramphal and Howe, dined at Buckingham Palace as planned. In Sonny Ramphal’s view, the Queen ‘made clear that the Commonwealth must not break up over this. Margaret did not like it. The Queen indicated her disagreement with Mrs Thatcher without ever having to say so.’170

  The odd thing was that the conference itself did not, in fact, end in disaster. Mrs Thatcher operated from Peter Marshall’s room in Marlborough House, where the conference was taking place (‘We establish that Mrs T likes Haig whisky,’ recorded Marshall).171 Despite her tactical dispute with Howe about how best to play the British hand, she was looking for agreement. She accepted Powell’s analysis on the eve of the meeting that Kaunda, Gandhi and so on ‘for all the talk … would relish avoiding a bust-up’.172 Since she was in such a difficult position, that was her attitude too. She even informed Helmut Kohl before the meeting began that she ‘might have to concede a bit’.173 She did not try to filibuster the Commonwealth’s efforts to ‘internationalize’ further measures. She accepted Howe’s warning not to repeat Nassau by belittling the deal afterwards. The review conference agreed that apartheid was not being dismantled and therefore that new measures were needed. Mrs Thatcher said that Britain would accept and implement the EEC measures agreed at The Hague (including the ban on the import of coal, iron, steel and Krugerrands) if the European partners would do the same.* No one publicly denounced anyone else.

  Everything suddenly calmed down. Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe went off on holiday. Mrs Thatcher went into hospital to have a long-planned operation to correct Dupuytren’s contracture on her fingers (see Chapter 15). Over a rather longer period of time, the government’s low opinion of Michael Shea’s behaviour was borne in upon Buckingham Palace,174 and he was quietly edged out of his post (‘not fast enough’, in the view of Sir William Heseltine).175

  What had this all been about? Was this a spectacular example of Mrs Thatcher’s self-defeating obduracy and dogmatism? What was the point of upsetting the Queen and colleagues and numerous friendly powers? Certainly she had often caused unnecessary antagonism. Certainly, in the annals of normal diplomacy, this was no way to behave. It is also true that, at this stage, she had little positive to show for her attempts to move the white government. But then it was a strength as well as a fault in Mrs Thatcher that she did business in a unique way. She was quite sure that economic sanctions would not achieve the desired effect and she was not, unlike most politicians, cynical enough to agree to them anyway for the sake of a quiet life. She did not want to be boxed in, as Howe was encouraging her, by accepting principles which she really disagreed with. She did not want British companies to lose business or South African blacks to lose jobs. She believed that South Africa could change peacefully to a multi-racial government, negotiated after the release of Nelson Mandela, if the right interlocutors could be found. At this stage, she felt that South Africa would eventually end up with constitutional arrangements similar to the Swiss model of highly independent cantons. ‘South Africa would never have a one-man, one-vote situation,’ she told Reagan that November.176 In this she was at odds with the ANC, but she certainly was not trying to prevent reform. As in her attitude to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, she was optimistic about what could be done with the right partner at the head of the South African government. She had been disappointed by Botha over this, but she believed that such a partner would eventually emerge and hoped to help influence that process. In this way she would prove more far-sighted than those who wished only to parade their disapproval of apartheid rather than thinking how best to move beyond it.

  Where she paid a higher price for her behaviour over South Africa and the Commonwealth was with Geoffrey Howe. Because she was, as Charles Powell put it, ‘so at odds in methods, personality and views’177 with Howe, she did not sufficiently respect him. Their disagreements over South Africa had been foreshadowed by Howe’s frustration with Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the Anglo-Irish negot
iations in 1984–5. There was ‘a fiery Celtic element to Geoffrey’, recalled Richard Ryder, ‘a Welsh hwyl. On the rare occasions when he gets angry, he gets very, very angry.’178 In July 1986, he was angry about many things – about being made a fool of on his South African mission, about being disregarded by Mrs Thatcher, about her being, as he saw it, too kind to the white South African government and too rude to the Commonwealth.

  He was also, perhaps, angry with himself for not challenging her more forcefully over Westland earlier in the year. He might already have missed the chance to succeed her, only to be blackguarded by Bernard Ingham.179* He was uneasily aware that when Mrs Thatcher failed to answer his letter about Ingham, he had done nothing further about it. He wrote in his memoirs that ‘the questions I had raised were questions for her to consider’.180 This was true, and he was right that she did not properly consider them; but neither did he resolve the point. So the issue festered.

  On the day the London review conference came to a close, Peter Marshall had the chance of a long talk with Robert Armstrong: ‘He says Mrs T doesn’t trust Howe … She is filled with a sense of mission and there is no one to support her (Tebbit is out of favour).’181 This was a fair summation.

  17

  Save the Bomb

  ‘She was the exclamation point’

  On 19 November 1985 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held their long-awaited first summit in Geneva. This marked a milestone in efforts to engage with the Soviet Union, which Mrs Thatcher had been pressing on the President since before Gorbachev became general secretary. Reagan returned from Geneva with his confidence in her judgment confirmed. ‘Maggie was right,’ he began his White House debriefing meeting. ‘We can do business with this man.’1 The actual business transacted at Geneva had not been very great, but the symbolic value had been considerable. The occasion was recorded by 3,500 journalists, and the two men got on well with one another. As George Shultz wrote, ‘Most of all, the precedent of serious and direct talk had been established.’2 Following Mrs Thatcher’s advice to Reagan the previous month, the leaders agreed at Geneva to hold two more summits, in Washington and Moscow.

  As befitted a loyal and influential ally, Mrs Thatcher spent the next year doing what she could to move US–Soviet relations onwards. Indeed, during several months when the two superpower leaders circled one another, talking of meeting, but not actually setting a date, she encouraged them both to get on with it. When they finally did so, however, she experienced the most tremendous shock. Responding positively to an unexpected invitation from the Soviet leader to talk in advance of their long-planned Washington summit, President Reagan met Gorbachev alone in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, in October 1986. As news filtered out of what he seemed to be offering the Soviet leader, Mrs Thatcher was appalled. Even several months later, she still trembled when she remembered the event. She told two visiting Reagan administration officials Paul Nitze and Richard Perle that Reykjavik had ‘come as an earthquake to the UK. It was the first time in her life that she had felt that there was no place on Earth on which she could put her feet and feel secure. It appeared that all Europe was to be sacrificed.’3 It seemed to her that her most powerful friend and greatest ideological soulmate had come within a whisker of getting rid of what she believed kept the West safe and free – the nuclear deterrent.

  The very strength of her relationship with Reagan caused Mrs Thatcher to be caught off-guard by what happened at Reykjavik. The level of trust between the two was such that disagreements could be frankly discussed. She saw it as her role both to win European support for American toughness and to ensure that the United States always remembered to consider European interests and feelings in its attitude to East–West relations. Before and immediately after the bombing of Libya in April 1986, for example, the administration’s hawks, citing Soviet violations of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), wanted to renounce the limits imposed on the US by the treaty.* They were determined to send a clear message to Moscow that the US would not tolerate one-sided agreements. In the previous year, Mrs Thatcher had helped persuade the US to stick to the SALT rules, and now she tried again. ‘As you know I regarded your decision last June to continue to adhere to SAL [sic] restraints as an important act of statesmanship,’ she wrote to Reagan. ‘I hope that you will feel able to maintain that position which earned the United States enormous respect.’4 When Paul Nitze came to see her, on behalf of the President, just after the Libyan adventure, she sharpened her point. ‘The Prime Minister said that if we announce that we are going to break the law, we will hand General Secretary Gorbachev an enormous victory …’ noted the US record.

  Gorbachev will say ‘this man … has just bombed Libya and is now announcing that he is going to break the law.’ This Soviet propaganda will be very effective with public opinion. She said that she is very concerned about the alliance right now and about Europe and its fragility – ‘they (the Europeans) are afraid and that is why they appease.’5

  Having made her protest, however, Mrs Thatcher did not go public, and the expected row about the treaty did not materialize at the G7 summit in Tokyo that May. Reagan wrote to Mrs Thatcher later in the month, repeating that he could no longer adhere to the treaty ‘unilaterally’, but promising to exercise restraint so that the US would remain technically within its limits for several more months.6 Realizing that this was not a battle which she should fight head-on, Mrs Thatcher decided to emphasize publicly that Reagan’s decision was ‘provisional’7 and present it as an opportunity for the Soviets to bring themselves back into compliance. She was doing her best to be, though she always avoided the phrase, a bridge between America and Europe.

  On the central issue of how to handle SDI and nuclear arms reduction, Mrs Thatcher and Reagan stayed in close touch. At Geneva, Gorbachev had well noted Reagan’s obsession with ridding the world of nuclear weapons. He felt he could turn this to his advantage. In January 1986, he therefore wrote to Reagan offering the complete abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2000, providing that the President gave up SDI. The Soviets made their proposal public immediately. This idea was entirely consistent with Moscow’s long-standing efforts to present the West with a poisoned chalice by suggesting complete disarmament, especially when the Soviets feared the West was pulling ahead in the arms race. Many in the US administration accordingly doubted its value, but George Shultz saw the offer as marking a move towards Reagan’s publicly stated position. Reagan agreed, wanting to go further. ‘Why wait until the end of the century for a world without nuclear weapons?’ he asked his advisers.8 Naturally, Reagan had no intention of giving Gorbachev what he wanted about SDI, but he authorized a friendly reply. In a statement welcoming the Soviet proposal he reminded the world that he had called publicly for the total abolition of nuclear weapons as early as 1983: ‘We, together with our allies, will give careful study to General Secretary Gorbachev’s suggestions.’9

  Mrs Thatcher’s ‘careful study’ made her no less sceptical than before. She simply did not believe the underlying assumption that nuclear weapons could disappear from the face of the earth. She discussed the matter in private with Richard Perle: ‘I recall her saying, “It is inconceivable that the Soviets would turn over their last nuclear weapon. They would cheat. I would cheat.” ’10 And she was remarkably frank in public, ranging herself against both the world leaders. ‘Both the President and Mr Gorbachev have said that they want to see a world without nuclear weapons,’ she told Geoffrey Smith. ‘I cannot see a world without nuclear weapons’: it was ‘pie in the sky’.11 She was frightened that Reagan genuinely did not understand the truth which seemed so blindingly obvious to her: ‘It was one of the few times, you know, when I think his aspirations left the reality of human nature.’12 She therefore doubted its merit even as a tactic to wrong-foot the Soviets, because she knew that, on this subject, she and the President did not stand on the same ground.

  On 11 February 1986, with the future of nuclear weapons much in mind, Mrs
Thatcher wrote a six-page letter to Reagan, offering ‘some thoughts on the handling of arms control issues at your next meeting with Mr Gorbachev’.13 Choosing her words carefully, she gave the sort of warning about Gorbachev which, a year earlier, the Americans had been inclined to give her:

  He is clearly a more astute operator than his predecessors, far more aware of the scope for playing on public opinion in the West. But under the veneer he is the same brand of dedicated Soviet Communist that we have known in the past, relentless in pursuing Soviet interests and prepared to take time over this.

  She explained his propaganda aims:

  When you launched the SDI, you set out the noble vision of a world without nuclear weapons. Gorbachev – and I think this is a good indication of his shrewdness – has latched on to this and produced his spurious timetable of simple steps for achieving the goal by the end of the century.

  Her concern was that this would create unrealistic public expectations. A nuclear-free world, she reminded Reagan, ‘would be a very risky place indeed unless there were concurrent steps to reduce the massive imbalance in the Soviet Union’s favour in conventional forces. In particular, Western Europe would be very much more vulnerable.’ She worried about proliferation, noting that ‘while nuclear weapons themselves might in theory be abolished, the knowledge of how to make them never will be. But the risk lies above all in undermining public support for our agreed strategy of deterrence and flexible response.’14*