The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Wherever she travelled she felt no inhibitions about plunging into local politics. In South Africa she urged Mandela and Chief Buthelezi to talk and it was even suggested that she might act as a mediator to bring them together.10 In Russia she gave strong backing to her now embattled friend Gorbachev, urging students at Moscow University to keep faith with perestroika; at the same time, however, she firmly supported the right of the Baltic republics to independence (which was not then the view of the British Government).11 Three months later, when Gorbachev was briefly deposed by a hardline Communist coup, and Western capitals held back to see the outcome before committing themselves, Mrs Thatcher took the lead in urging the Soviet people to take to the streets in protest. She openly supported the defiance of Boris Yeltsin, holed up in the Russian parliament building, and even managed to hold a twenty-five-minute telephone conversation with him to express her encouragement. 12 Likewise, arriving in Warsaw, where the post-Communist government had been making deep cuts in subsidies and public services, she was ‘not at all shy about wading into the Polish election campaign, praising the embattled finance minister and dismissing left-wing parties’.13 The whole world was now her constituency: or, as she herself put it with her habitual royal plural, ‘We operate now on a global scale.’14

  But she could not confine herself entirely to the world stage. The issues she felt most strongly about inevitably impacted on domestic politics.Any criticism she made of the Government’s stance towards Iraq, the disintegration of Yugoslavia or – above all – Europe was inescapably a comment on her successor’s lack of judgement, experience or resolution. At least she could have no complaint about the conduct of the war to liberate Kuwait. In her first intervention in the Commons on 28 February she simply congratulated Major on the war’s successful conclusion and accepted his tribute to her staunchness the previous August. She did not yet criticise the coalition’s failure to overthrow Saddam, though she did point out that the problem of Iraq was not resolved and warned darkly that ‘the victories of peace will take longer than the battles of war’.15 Within a few weeks, however, she was demanding that the Government should send troops to protect the Kurdish population fleeing from Saddam’s forces in northern Iraq. In fact Major was already working on a plan to create ‘safe havens’ for the Kurds, for which he was able to secure French, German and eventually American backing; so on this occasion he was able to neutralise her intervention. It would not always be so easy.

  In the autumn of 1991 Mrs Thatcher took an early, clear and courageous view on the break-up of Yugoslavia, which put her bitterly at odds with the Government over the following years as the complex inter-ethnic conflict escalated. As the Serbs sought to maintain by force their domination of the former federation, she boldly championed the right of the constituent republics – first Croatia and Slovenia, later Bosnia-Hercegovina – to break away. She saw the issue partly as one of nationalist self-determination, with echoes of her resistance to the federal pretensions of Brussels; but also as the latest front in the continuing battle of democracy against Communism.

  Major and Hurd, however, were determined to avoid either Britain or NATO getting sucked into a Balkan civil war and asserted a policy of non-intervention, with an embargo on the supply of arms to all sides, to which they stubbornly adhered in the face of mounting evidence of Serb atrocities. For the next few years Mrs Thatcher’s militant anti-Communism was unusually allied with the humanitarian conscience of the world in demanding action against the Serbs, beating in vain against the cautious pragmatism of the British Government, which took the lead in blocking direct NATO, EU or UN intervention.

  But the issue on which Mrs Thatcher set herself most uncompromisingly against her successor was, inevitably, Europe. From the time of her Bruges speech her attitude towards the Community had been hardening, but so long as she was in office her growing antipathy was restrained by the need to negotiate the best deal for Britain that she could achieve. From the moment she left office that restraint was off. Now she was free to follow her instinct, to criticise the deals which Major and Hurd secured, and she did so without inhibition or consideration of the pressures that would have weighed with her if she had still been in government. On the contrary, she felt no compunction about putting herself at the head of the hitherto quite small section of the Tory party which was bitterly opposed to any further European integration, thereby helping to tip the party’s centre of gravity over the next seven years from a broadly pro-European to a strongly Eurosceptic, even Europhobic, stance. By leading the opposition on this issue she not only thwarted Major’s vague ambition to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’, but also undermined his authority more generally, fuelling a civil war in the party which not only destroyed his government in the short term, but wrecked the credibility of the Tories as a governing party for years to come. This was her revenge for November 1990.

  So long as she remained in the Commons it was plain that Mrs Thatcher would dominate the House whenever she chose to speak. It therefore came as a huge relief to Major when she announced that she would stand down at the next election. She had been in two minds whether to stay in the Commons or go to the Lords. Though no great parliamentarian, she was clear that she must retain a platform in one or other House. Some of her supporters urged her to stay in the Commons, mainly to keep the Government up to the mark, but also to keep open the possibility of a comeback in the event of some future crisis. At the end of March she was still wavering. Finally she decided that she would be freer to speak her mind if she made it clear that she had ruled out the possibility of a comeback.

  For all her disillusion with Major, she did want the Tories to win the coming election. On 12 December outward cordiality was restored when the Majors and most of the Cabinet attended the Thatchers’ fortieth wedding-anniversary celebration at Claridge’s. During the early months of 1992 she concentrated on her memoirs, paying just two visits to the United States where she managed to say nothing controversial.

  Major called the election for 9 April. In appreciation of her restraint and doubtless in the hope that she would keep it up till polling day, he sent Mrs Thatcher a bunch of twenty-four pink roses. She was unimpressed. ‘A bunch of flowers won’t make up for a £28 billion deficit, Woodrow,’ she complained.16 But for the moment she bit her lip, so much so that Andrew Turnbull (now serving Major) told Wyatt on 17 March that ‘her behaviour has been absolutely first-class… We couldn’t have asked for more. She’s been wonderful.’17

  She played a fairly discreet part in the campaign, appearing just once with Major at a rally for Tory candidates where she raised morale with a strong endorsement of his leadership, and doing walkabouts in selected marginal seats. In his memoirs Major alleged that ‘allies of my predecessor’ did their best to undermine his campaign;18 but Mrs Thatcher herself was in America for the last week, returning only on the evening of polling day in time to attend a round of election-night parties. She watched the results with Wyatt in a small room at the top of Alistair McAlpine’s house in a mood of mellow magnanimity. She emerged to tell the press: ‘It is a great night. It is the end of Socialism.’19 The next day she hailed Major’s ‘famous victory’ and urged him now to press ‘full steam ahead’.20

  Yet within days she published a devastating interview in the American magazine Newsweek which expressed her real feelings. Under the headline ‘Do Not Undo My Work’ she poured scorn on her successor’s ability to fill her shoes:

  I don’t accept the idea that all of a sudden Major is his own man. He has been Prime Minister for 17 months and he inherited all these great achievements of the past eleven and a half years which have fundamentally changed Britain.

  Major, she insisted, was entitled to chart his own course only within the limits that she had set out.21 This was a breathtakingly arrogant put-down of the elected Prime Minister on the morrow of his ‘famous victory’. But she was unrepentant. ‘I only said I would keep quiet during the election,’ she told Wyatt.22 She was determined not
to be silenced.

  There had been some speculation about what type of peerage she would take. Prime Ministers are traditionally entitled to an earldom, so there was a possibility that she might become a countess. Having resurrected hereditary titles for others, it would have been consistent to take one herself. Rather quaintly, however, she felt that she and Denis lacked the means to support a hereditary title.23 Mark already had Denis’s baronetcy to look forward to; so in the end she concluded: ‘I thought it was enough to be a life peer.’24 On 6 June she was gazetted as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire. Cynics noted that she had never cared for Grantham; Kesteven sounded so much more distinguished.

  She took her seat in the Upper House on 30 June – ‘like a lioness entering into what she must realise is something of a cage’25 – just in time to speak in a debate on the Maastricht Treaty on 3 July.‘Your maiden speech is supposed to be non-controversial,’Wyatt reminded her. ‘But I shall only be following precedent,’ she protested. ‘Macmillan in his maiden speech attacked me.’26 In fact, she made a fairly gracious and even witty speech, written for her by Charles Powell, dissenting from the Government’s support for Maastricht but expressing confidence in Major’s ability to use Britain’s forthcoming chairmanship of the Council of Ministers to influence the development of the Community in the right direction.

  Her restraint was short-lived. She was working on her memoirs in Switzerland in August when the Vice-President of Bosnia came to beg her to make a fresh appeal on behalf of his country. She responded with a flurry of articles and TV interviews on both sides of the Atlantic, calling for military action to halt the continuing Serb assault on Gorazde and Sarajevo, end the brutal policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and save the Bosnian state.What was happening in Bosnia, she declared, was ‘reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis’.27 Despairing of the ‘paralysis’ of the EU, she called on the Americans to take a lead. NATO, she wrote in the New York Times, was ‘the most practical instrument to hand’. The Balkans were not ‘out of area’, but part of Europe.28 In reply to those who argued that Western intervention would only exacerbate the conflict, she insisted that she was not calling for a full-scale military invasion, just the bombing of Serbian supply routes and the lifting of the arms embargo which prevented the Bosnians buying the means to defend themselves.29 But her call fell on deaf ears. With a few exceptions, most MPs of both parties, most of the Establishment, elder statesmen like Ted Heath and most commentators backed the Foreign Office line that Britain had no interest in getting drawn into the conflict: many, frankly, took the view that the best outcome to be hoped for was a quick Serb victory. The most that Major and Hurd would do was to contribute British troops to a UN force protecting convoys of humanitarian aid; but this only strengthened the argument against military intervention, since these troops would have become vulnerable to retaliation if NATO had bombed the Serbs. Douglas Hurd still believes that active Western intervention would only have increased the bloodshed and made a bad situation worse.30

  Nevertheless, Lady Thatcher kept up her demand, with mounting contempt for the Government’s inertia, for the next three years, until eventually the Americans stepped in with enough force to bring the Serbs to the negotiating table. In December 1992 she warned of a ‘holocaust’ in Bosnia and insisted: ‘We could have stopped this. We could still do so.’ By treating the conflict as a purely internal matter, the West had ‘actually given comfort to the aggressor’. 31 In April 1993, following the first massacre at Srebrenica – the second, even worse one, was in July 1995 – she rejected Hurd’s plea that lifting the arms embargo would merely create ‘a level killing field’, as ‘a terrible and disgraceful phrase’. Bosnia was ‘already a killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again’. The horrors being perpetrated were ‘not worthy of Europe, not worthy of the West and not worthy of the United States… It is in Europe’s sphere of influence. It should be in Europe’s sphere of conscience… We are little more than accomplices to a massacre.’32 Privately she was said to have told Hurd: ‘Douglas, Douglas, you would make Neville Chamberlain look like a warmonger.’33

  In retrospect she was probably right. One can respect the reluctance of Major, Hurd and initially Bill Clinton (who succeeded George Bush as US President in 1993) to escalate the war by taking sides. Their instinct all along was to try to secure a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement via a succession of intermediaries: they could not believe that the Serbs could be so ruthless and unreasonable. But the fact was that the deployment of American force was in the end the only thing that brought the Serbs to conclude the Dayton Agreement in 1995. As so often, Lady Thatcher’s bleak view of human nature and the necessity of military strength to defeat aggressors was more realistic than the pragmatism of those who thought themselves the ‘realists’. The slaughter could have been stopped earlier if Europe had found the will to act firmly in its own back yard. It was ironic that she who so opposed Europe’s ambition to develop a single foreign policy should have been the one calling for it to act unitedly in Bosnia. Sadly, events justified her scepticism and vindicated her view that no trouble anywhere in the world would ever be tackled without American leadership.

  It was relatively easy for the Government to dismiss the former Prime Minister’s lectures about Bosnia. She caused them more serious difficulty nearer home in the autumn of 1992 when the Maastricht Treaty finally came before Parliament. The Government suffered the worst possible curtain raiser to this debate on 16 September – ‘Black Wednesday’ – when Norman Lamont was humiliatingly forced to abandon Britain’s membership of the ERM. After all the wrangles with Lawson and Howe about joining, culminating in Mrs Thatcher’s reluctant acquiescence in October 1990, sterling crashed out of the system after just two years, at the cost of some £15 billion of the country’s gold reserves and dealing a blow to the Government’s reputation for financial competence from which it never recovered. Securing Mrs Thatcher’s agreement to Britain’s belated entry had been Major’s personal triumph as Chancellor: now premature exit wrecked his premiership. Lady Thatcher – in Washington at the time – could not help but be delighted. ‘If you try to buck the market, the market will buck you.’34 She could not gloat too openly in public, but nothing would stop her trumpeting her vindication in private. Lamont told Wyatt that she was ‘ringing all her friends saying, “Isn’t it marvellous, I told you so etc.”’35 She warned against any thought of rejoining the ERM, but urged the Government to capitalise on its escape by cutting interest rates to beat the recession.

  Back at Westminster on 4 November the Government faced two crucial Commons divisions on a so-called ‘paving’ vote, called by Major to reassure his European partners before the committee stage of the Maastricht Bill. With an overall Tory majority of just twenty-one, and two or three dozen Europhobes threatening to vote against the Government, Major’s survival was on the line. The whips pulled out all the stops; but Lady Thatcher summoned wavering backbenchers to her room to tell them firmly what she expected of them.At the last moment Major personally cajoled leading Eurosceptics into the Government lobby with a promise that the Government would not finally ratify the treaty until after a second Danish referendum. By such means the Government won the first division by six votes, the second by three. Thus Major survived by the skin of his teeth. But he could not forget that at this crisis of his premiership his predecessor had done her best to destroy him.

  For most of the first half of 1993 Lady Thatcher concentrated on her memoirs, while the Maastricht Bill ground through the Commons, suffering just two minor defeats in committee. But when it went up to the Lords in June she re-emerged to lead the attack in the Upper House, denying that the treaty followed naturally from the Single European Act which she had signed – ‘I could never have signed this treaty’ – and demanding a referendum before it was ratified.36 With Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and John Wakeham speaking for the Government, the treaty was overwhelmingly approved. But th
e schism that its passage caused in the Tory party has never fully healed.

  The Mummy’s curse

  There was just one issue on which Lady Thatcher steadily supported the Government. Between 1992 and 1997 she probably devoted more time to Hong Kong than to any other subject. Maastricht and Bosnia made the headlines, but Hong Kong was the issue on which she felt she still had a responsibility and could exert an influence. The Chinese leadership still treated her with enormous respect and she handled them – particularly the charmless Prime Minister Li Peng – with a skilful mixture of outspokenness and tact. There was a particularly sharp diplomatic crisis in March 1995 when the Chinese were making difficulties about a number of thorny issues concerning the handover: among other things, they had got it into their heads that the British were planning to remove Hong Kong’s entire gold reserves with them when they left. Lady Thatcher flew out, with the approval of Major, and broke the logjam by announcing sweetly but decisively in the hearing of journalists at the red-carpet ceremony at the airport exactly what she had come to get straight. No more was heard about the gold reserves or any of the other stumbling blocks.37 In public and in private she boldly proclaimed her confidence that economic development in China would inevitably bring political freedom in its wake; and she protested firmly about Beijing’s treatment of dissidents. In 1994 she announced that she had already booked rooms in Hong Kong so as to be present in person for the handover; and indeed when the day came, on 1 July 1997, she was there – with Tony Blair and Prince Charles – to witness the interminable ceremony in pouring rain. So far, she acknowledged in 2002, the Chinese had ‘generally honoured their commitments’.38