The Prime Minister rose early at Blair House* on the morning of Thursday 26 February to put in some extra preparation for her 10 a.m. tête à tête with President Reagan. As it was not known which subjects he might raise in their discussion, she carefully reviewed the briefing papers prepared for her by the Foreign Office. One on the Middle East aroused her disapproval. She made a number of harsh comments about it over breakfast to Sir Michael Palliser, whose laconic replies did not calm her indignation. So she asked Carrington to join them. Before he could sit down, she said accusingly: ‘Your policy on Palestine is going to lose us the next election.’
‘I rather thought it was the government’s policy on Palestine’, answered the Foreign Secretary.
His urbanity increased her irascibility. She let fly with a string of offensive remarks about ‘the moral cowardice’ of the Foreign Office, and then returned to the impact of its Palestinian proposals on domestic politics.
‘What’s more, not only is your Palestine policy going to lose us the next election,’ she hectored Carrington, ‘it is going to lose me my seat in Finchley … I will definitely lose my seat in Finchley because of this stuff’, she shouted, slamming the briefing paper down on the table.
Now it was Carrington’s turn to get angry. ‘If you think that British foreign policy should be based on whether you will lose your seat in Finchley, you need a new Foreign Secretary’, he retorted, storming out of the room and slamming the door.1
After this upheaval there was, to put it mildly, a chill between the two senior members of the British delegation as they headed off to the White House for their summit with the President of the United States. It was non-speaks in the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce on the short journey across Pennsylvania Avenue. But the civilities were restored after the tête a tête and the welcoming ceremonies. The Prime Minister murmured to her Foreign Secretary: ‘I don’t think we did very well this morning, did we?’ It was, by her standards, an apology.
What may have been behind the Prime Minister’s aggression at Blair House was an anxiety that the strongly pro-Israeli Ronald Reagan was going to ask her awkward questions about the British proposals for progress on the Israel– Palestine issue. But the broad-brush President was not interested in getting down to such detail. He simply wanted to throw a warm mantle of welcome around his fellow-conservative head of government. So the summit, which dealt with few issues of substance, apart from the President’s determination to resist the spread of communism in Latin America, passed off as a great success. Nevertheless, the early morning row had highlighted Margaret Thatcher’s fear that Carrington, as she put it, ‘was intent on pursuing lines which I knew would in practice be quite fruitless, given the President’s unshakable commitment to a limited number of positions’.2 In fact, Carrington had no such intention, so the eruption had been needless and pointless.
Lord Carrington was too grand and secure a figure to become unduly bothered by an up and downer with his boss. As at Blair House, he could at times be baffled by her rudeness and wrong-headedness. But he also saw her strength of will and determination. He said:
I admired her enormously, particularly her courage and her character. I understood that in her passion to change things, she decided to ignore people, sometimes trample over people, who told her she couldn’t or shouldn’t take such a course. But the problem was that if you do that when you’re wrong, you can get into serious trouble.3
There was quite a lot of trampling in the early days of the Carrington–Thatcher foreign-policy partnership. She was hostile to the Foreign Office as an institution and to some of its leading mandarins. She behaved unfairly to its Permanent Secretary, Sir Michael Palliser, mainly because his elaborately polite style jarred with her preference for a rough and tumble argument. This was all too often based, at least in her first two or three years as Prime Minister, on ill-informed prejudices. Carrington explained:
You had to be pretty quick with her because her instincts on foreign policy were often wrong, but her brain was very good. So you had to get to her before those instincts had pre-empted the brain. If you didn’t reach her early enough, it took quite a struggle before her heart would rather grudgingly yield to her highly intelligent head. By golly it was hard work sometimes!4
One area of hard work was policy towards the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher felt the Foreign Office was soft towards the Kremlin. ‘You don’t have anyone in your department who knows anything about the Russians’, she told Carrington contemptuously.
‘You’re absolutely wrong. I have two outstanding experts. Come and meet them’, he replied. The following evening at 6 p.m. Margaret Thatcher came round to the Foreign Office to have a drink with its top Sovietologists, Christopher Mallaby and Rodric Braithwaite.
Carrington had warned his mandarins about her propensity to interrupt and, sure enough, within seconds of Mallaby’s opening presentation he found himself being contradicted by the Prime Minister. He pressed on regardless with the magisterial rebuff: ‘If I may just be allowed to continue …’ By the time he and Braithwaite had finished, she was captivated. ‘She was so impressed that from then on she sidelined her gurus’, claimed Carrington.5 This was not entirely correct, for she continued to listen to her private anti-Soviet voices such as Robert Conquest. But at least she gave more weight to the departmental advice for a while.
Two weeks after this meeting, the Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary made a refuelling stop in Moscow on their way to the G7 summit held in Tokyo. To their surprise, half the Politburo of the Soviet Union, headed by Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, turned out to meet her. They gave an unscheduled dinner in her honour in an aircraft hanger. After listening to a speech of diplomatic bromides from the Soviet leader, Margaret Thatcher responded with a sharp and detailed reply. Looking magnificent in her cobalt blue suit and matching hat, she fired off a salvo of questions, vigorously interrupting the answers.
One of her major concerns was the plight of the Vietnamese boat people, which was causing problems to the British colony of Hong Kong. The Prime Minister said that what was happening was a disgrace not only to the regime in Vietnam, but to communism as a whole. Surely the Soviet Union could exercise its influence to put a stop to it? Premier ‘Cosy Gin’, as Carrington nicknamed Kosygin, gave a watery smile and the excuse that the boat people ‘were all drug-takers or criminals’. Margaret Thatcher interrupted him: ‘What, one million of them? Is communism so bad that a million have to take drugs to steal to live?’6 The subject was immediately dropped. According to Carrington, ‘The Politburo’s eyes were out on stalks as she told them off on issue after issue. They were mesmerised. They were astonished at being beaten over the head, but they saw her strength and quality.’7
The Prime Minister was also awarded a star-quality rating in Tokyo, where over a thousand journalists turned out at the airport to report on the phenomenon of a woman leader. But she was underwhelmed by her first experience of global summitry. Prior to departure for Tokyo, her major preoccupation had been to ensure that the British delegation was the smallest of the participating G7 countries. She made her Private Secretary for Overseas Affairs, Bryan Cartledge, count and recount the size of the other delegations in the hope that they would all be larger. ‘In the end, we were only the second smallest’, he recalled. ‘We were beaten by the Canadians. She was very cross about that.’8
Her frugality about the size of her official party might have seemed an odd preoccupation had it not been for the pointlessness of the summit. Carrington said:
It was useless, a complete waste of time – nothing agreed, nothing achieved. She was bemused by the stupidity of it all. We both found it impossible to tell whether the Japanese Prime Minister chairing the conference, Masayoshi Ohira, was asleep or awake. The only point to it all was that she did meet President Carter for the first time. She was a bit bemused by him.9
Carrington was her tutor on her geopolitical learning curve. Sometimes he handled her as a father figure, sometimes as her le
ading man, sometimes as her in-house humorist. One occasion when he made her laugh came during a Downing Street meeting with Chairman Hua Guofeng, the immediate successor to Chairman Mao. The Chinese leader opened the discussion with a fifty-minute monologue, not allowing the Prime Minister to get a word in edgeways. Carrington passed her a note saying: ‘You are speaking too much, as usual.’ She opened this missive just as Chairman Hua was saying, ‘Now I come to the tragedy of the Holocaust …’ He must have been baffled by the Prime Minister pulling out her handkerchief to suppress a fit of giggles. Those inscrutable British!10
Usually, however, it was Margaret Thatcher who seized the lion’s share of the dialogue during such meetings. On at least a couple of occasions Carrington had to pass her a note saying, ‘He’s come 1,000 miles. Let him say something.’ She took such teasing well; partly because, up to a point, she was amused by the irreverence of an authentic toff, and partly because she respected his foreign-policy expertise. As a former UK High Commissioner in Australia, First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for Defence, an international banker and a director of Rio Tinto Zinc, he had come to know the world and almost everyone of importance in it. To bring the new Prime Minister up to the same level of understanding was his greatest challenge. Carrington recalled:
Frankly, there were times when I found her intensely irritating. Her prejudices were sometimes extraordinary. She seemed to believe all blacks were communists. When we were on our first trip to Africa together, she put on a pair of dark glasses just before our VC10 touched down at Lusaka. ‘What on earth are those for?’ I asked, since we were landing in darkness. ‘I am absolutely certain that they are going to throw acid in my face’, she replied. ‘I told her not to be so silly, and that an African crowd would be much more likely to cheer her. That is exactly what happened.’11
The Thatcher–Carrington preparations for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Lusaka were particularly fraught. The most important issue on the agenda was Rhodesia. She had strong views on its future, a problem which had proved intractable to successive British governments ever since the regime of Ian Smith had made its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965. Thirteen years later Ian Smith reached a power-sharing agreement with the leaders of the two more moderate African parties. This was ratified in the April 1979 election, with Bishop Muzorewa becoming Prime Minister, but was boycotted by the two major African nationalist parties, and condemned by most international opinion. But Margaret Thatcher’s personal emissary to Rhodesia, the former Colonial Secretary Viscount Boyd of Merton, reported that the elections had been fair and valid.
After reading Boyd’s report, Margaret Thatcher’s instincts were to recognise the Smith–Muzorewa settlement. Carrington persuaded her otherwise. It was a U-turn that required all his formidable skills of argument. He recalled:
We had several flaming rows. In the end she listened to the evidence, which was that every single Commonwealth country as well as the United States and Europe would not wear the solution she wanted. But she still did not give way completely, until we were on the flight to Lusaka. While we were having dinner in mid-air, I said to her that I thought the best result we would get from the conference would be to pull off a damage-limitation exercise. She claimed she’d never heard of such a phrase – ‘typical Foreign Office language’, she called it – and then she said, ‘I want to do better than that’.12
It was the first clear sign that the Carrington tutorials on Africa might be beginning to work.
RHODESIA
Solving the problem of Rhodesia was Margaret Thatcher’s first major success as Prime Minister at home or abroad. After her initial obduracy she turned out to be a surprisingly pragmatic operator in the unfamiliar waters of African diplomacy. She showed courage, charm and considerable flexibility in achieving the desired result.
She was frightened and worried when she arrived in Lusaka. Although her fears of having acid thrown in her face proved groundless, as Carrington had assured her, it still took courage to walk into the crowds (without her dark glasses) and to have to face a hostile media conference. In the airport chaos she became separated from her staff, including her Press Secretary, Henry James. She was unwell because of a stomach bug, and nearly fainted. Yet she gave as good as she got from the hostile Zambian journalists, who treated her as a colonial cardboard cut-out, and described her as ‘a racist’.13 But the British press corps thought she showed grace and spirit under the pressure of her interrogation. John Simpson of the BBC reported that she had given ‘a magnificent performance’.14
The atmosphere at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was more friendly. Margaret Thatcher’s mistrust of Africa softened under the warmth of the welcome she received. This had a lot to do with the Queen’s skill at presiding over the social side of the conference. Also, the presidents of the ‘front-line’ states, namely Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia, were politically more accommodating in private than they sounded in their public statements. Many of the other twenty-seven heads of government attending were also helpful in nudging the main protagonists towards an agreement.
The most positive leader was the host of the conference, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. He went out of his way to cajole his fellow Africans into accepting the British proposals they did not initially like. He also charmed Margaret Thatcher (or did she charm him?) in a session of dance-floor diplomacy. The photographs of the quickstep between the Zambian President and the British Prime Minister came to symbolise their good rapport. According to Denis Thatcher, their whirl round the ballroom ‘turned the trick’ at the conference.15
In reality, the trick was turned by the surprise reversal of what was widely assumed to be Margaret Thatcher’s position on Rhodesia. She accepted a bold plan, the brainchild of an imaginative FCO official, Robin Renwick, that Britain should abandon its impotent role as the colonial power and assume a powerful new role as the decolonising power. To the astonishment of the assembled heads of government, the Prime Minister announced that the Smith–Muzorewa settlement would be abandoned. Britain would take the driving seat in delivering black majority rule, not the United Nations. Rhodesia would first resort to its pre-UDI colonial status with a British governor who would supervise direct elections policed by British troops. The future constitutional arrangements would be decided by a British-chaired conference at Lancaster House in London with the key African politicians, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo at the table. It was a U-turn but it was a U-turn on her terms. Some of the Africans were unenthusiastic but once Kaunda backed the plan, declaring that ‘the Iron Lady has brought a ray of hope on the dark horizon’, they all fell into line.16
Margaret Thatcher had misgivings about the plan she endorsed. The way she read out her part of the communiqué at the end of the conference was in a head-down, high-speed monotone, far removed from her usual vocal range when handing down the commandments of conviction politics. But in the excitement of getting the deal, she finally became committed to it. Having arrived in Lusaka fearful, she left hopeful. As Carrington put it: ‘She didn’t really believe that we would ever agree a final settlement, but once she saw there was a real hope of getting an agreement she went for it.’17
When the long-running Rhodesia saga moved to London in September, the Prime Minister left the details of the Lancaster House constitutional conference to her Foreign Secretary. It took sixteen weeks of arduous negotiations between the parties. It was not her show, but she did play two key cards in it with clarity and courage.
First, she remained determinedly aloof from the negotiating process. The white Rhodesians, egged on by the Rhodesia Lobby in London, had always expected that she would act as a final court of appeal through which her ‘kith and kin’ might be able to extract some last-minute concessions. She would have none of it. She was firm in the commitment she had made in Lusaka to black majority rule.
Second, she took a considerable risk, when the civil war was still raging in
Rhodesia, in sending Lord Soames out to Salisbury as Governor. He and the small contingent of British troops protecting him could easily have been engulfed in the violence. But the gamble was taken and it worked. Soames was able to supervise free, fair and peaceful elections in February 1980. They produced a decisive result. Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister, and power was formally transferred from Britain to an independent Zimbabwe on 17 April 1980.
Watching the independence ceremony on television with her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow, Margaret Thatcher wept as the Union Jack was lowered. ‘The poor Queen’, she said. ‘Do you realise the number of colonies that have been handed over from the British Empire since she came to the throne?’18
For the next fifteen or so years, there seemed few reasons for shedding tears over Zimbabwe. Although it quickly became a one-party state, the worst fears of the pessimists were not realised. The civil war ended, black- and white-owned farms flourished, the population was well fed, infant mortality halved, secondary school places quadrupled. Although Mugabe made many speeches about his Marxist credo, not an acre of land was confiscated and not a single business was compulsorily nationalised. As a mixed economy it was relatively successful. Only at the end of the century did Mugabe emerge as a tyrannical dictator who launched violence against white farmers, seizing their land and handing it over to his cronies. He also brutalised his people with cruel oppression and starvation.
So what looked like a diplomatic triumph in 1980 had turned to ashes by the early twenty-first century. Margaret Thatcher cannot be blamed for this tragedy, which unfolded long after she left power. In the period when Zimbabwean independence took root, she won high praise for her statescraft. In her heart of hearts, she might well have preferred to maintain British colonial rule or a power-sharing regime along Smith–Muzorewa lines. But these were not options. Given the politics of Africa at the time of the Lusaka conference in 1979, she found the best solution. Sadly, it lasted for only one generation.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 37
