Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  EUROPE

  ‘I came to realise that Margaret Thatcher didn’t really like people whose mother tongue was not English’, said Lord Carrington. ‘She mistrusted Europeans, and her dealings with them were often very embarrassing because she was so rude to everyone.’19

  Although mistrust and bad manners were often at the forefront of Margaret Thatcher’s many arguments with her fellow heads of government in Europe, it should be recorded that the opening blows of rudeness were struck against her, not by her. The perpetrators were the leaders of France and Germany.

  Her first foreign visitor to Downing Street in May 1979 was the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. She initially found him an attractive personality, and was dismayed when he patronised her with a condescending attitude. However, in the folie de grandeur stakes, he was soon overtaken by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France. As the host of the European Council summit in Strasbourg in June, the French President went out of his way to snub the British Prime Minister by not sitting next to her at any meal. He also insisted on being served first, as head of state, instead of yielding this courtesy to Europe’s first woman leader, as most participants expected. ‘Silly of him’, said Carrington. ‘Everyone commented unfavourably.’20

  The Strasbourg summit was not about slights against Margaret Thatcher, but about an issue of substance that she regarded as a high priority. It later became known as ‘The Bloody British Question’, or BBQ, although needless to say it was not so described in the Foreign Office briefing paper prepared for the Prime Minister by Sir Michael Butler, UK Representative to the European Community in Brussels.

  Margaret Thatcher was dissatisfied with Butler’s paper, which she thought was too ready to make compromises on the question of Britain’s contribution to the community budget. So she commissioned an alternative briefing paper from the Treasury. Its author was a young Assistant Under Secretary, Peter Middleton, whom she summoned to Chequers to be interrogated on it. This was a testing experience, but he made such a favourable impression on the Prime Minister that it led to his meteoric rise, four years later, to the top job in his department as Permanent Secretary. For Middleton was the original architect of the case Margaret Thatcher launched at Strasbourg for the return of ‘our money’.

  The ‘our money’ campaign had its roots in the complex imbalances between British import levies and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) benefits within the EU budget. It was common ground that those structural imbalances should be redressed by a budget rebate to Britain. What was not common ground was the amount of the rebate (£1 billion a year according to Middleton’s figures) and the priority that should be given to it.

  Margaret Thatcher came to Strasbourg spoiling for a fight. She wanted the British budget rebate to be taken as the first item on the agenda, and to be separated from all the rest of the horse-trading on budgetary issues. This was not the Franco-German way of doing business. President Giscard d’Estaing and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt resented Margaret Thatcher’s nationalistic approach. They were dismissive towards her, and only grudgingly agreed to consider the issue at their next meeting.

  Lord Carrington thought that the European leaders’ attitude to her was ‘Pretty stupid … enormously short-sighted and selfish’.21 By contrast, Margaret Thatcher was rather pleased with herself. ‘I felt that I had made an impression as someone who meant business’, she said.22

  Between the Strasbourg summit in June and the next European Council at Dublin in November, the British Prime Minister sounded increasingly determined. She let it be known that she was considering withholding Britain’s VAT payments to the Community – which would have been illegal. Delivering the 1979 Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture in Luxembourg on 18 October, she described the treatment of Britain over the European Community budget as ‘demonstrably unjust’ and ‘politically indefensible’. She continued: ‘I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forgo improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest.’23

  At the Dublin Council meeting in November, Sister Bountiful became Sister Aggressive. She was offered a £350 million rebate, which the Europeans thought was their first move in a bargaining negotiation. She rejected it contemptuously as ‘a third of a loaf’.24 Thereafter, she spent the rest of the evening upbraiding her fellow heads of government in what Carrington described as ‘a rant’,25 in a repetitious flow of rhetoric with the constant refrain, ‘It’s my money I want back’.26

  Helmut Schmidt pretended to fall asleep. Giscard d’Estaing read a newspaper. According to Roy Jenkins, the President of the European Commission, ‘She kept us all round the dinner table for four interminable hours … She spoke without pause, but not without repetition … It was obvious to everyone except her that she wasn’t making progress and was alienating people.’27

  The alienation was a two-way street. The friction of personalities was one problem. The lordly Giscard d’Estaing could not bear the over-loquacious lady he privately derided as ‘la fille d’épicier’. Helmut Schmidt was no less contemptuous of the anti-communitarian attitudes of the grocer’s daughter. He walked out of the Dublin dinner shaking with rage saying: ‘I can’t stand this any longer … I can’t deal with someone like that.’28

  But Margaret Thatcher was not flustered by either Gallic scorn or Teutonic tantrums. She was proud to be distrustful towards what she later called ‘The Franco-German carve up of Europe’.29

  Deep in her psyche she was still the patriotic Grantham girl who remembered the war all too well. If she sounded like a Little Englander it was because that was her character. She saw everything through the prism of British interests, a position she and the majority of her electorate thought was entirely right and proper for a British Prime Minister.

  The morning after the disastrous dinner in Dublin, Margaret Thatcher returned to the fray with still more detailed arguments on the unfairness of Britain’s treatment in the EEC budget. Five minutes before the final session of the summit broke up, she reluctantly agreed to a postponement of the issue until the next meeting in Luxembourg, which took place in April 1980. There she was offered a rebate of £750 million, which her Foreign Office advisers thought was a fair deal. To considerable astonishment, she turned it down flat on the grounds that it was only a two-year deal. This imperious ‘No’ to three-quarters of the loaf she had been seeking stunned her own team as much as the European leaders. Now it was Giscard’s turn to walk out in a bad temper. ‘I will not allow such a contemptible spectacle to occur again’, was his parting shot.30

  Margaret Thatcher seemed to be enjoying her isolation. She told BBC Radio 4 that she was pleased that the Europeans were calling her a ‘she-de Gaulle’.31 She received a good reception to her statement on the Luxembourg summit from the House of Commons. The image of British Maggie giving the bureaucrats of Brussels a good handbagging† played well across the country. It was also a welcome diversion from the economic troubles at home as well as the negotiating realities within the EEC. For domestic reasons of their own, the French and Germans were anxious to settle the budget question. For all the umbrage taken by the French and German leaders, the argument was about a comparatively small amount of money measured against EEC finances. So on 30 May a new round of negotiations took place at the Council of Foreign Ministers – without Margaret Thatcher.

  The British negotiators, Lord Carrington and his House of Commons spokesman Ian Gilmour, did better than expected. They improved the rebate terms by £50 million, and extended them into a third year. So they returned from their all-night negotiations in Brussels with some satisfaction, only to be greeted at Chequers by an extremely dissatisfied Margaret Thatcher, who did not even offer them a cup of coffee. ‘Had we been bailiffs arriving to take possession of the furniture,’ recalled Ian Gilmour, ‘we would probably have been more cordially received. The Prime Minister was like a firework whose fuse had already been lit; we could almost hear the sizzling.’32

  The firew
orks chastened Carrington. His Assistant Private Secretary, Stephen Wall, remembered ‘his mixture of exasperation tinged with reluctant admiration, that after he and Gilmour had negotiated for days and nights, and secured a deal … Margaret Thatcher should treat them as if they were schoolboys who had failed to produce their homework to the standard required.’33

  In the end, the schoolboys outwitted their schoolmistress. Gilmour ignored the Prime Minister’s fulminations and briefed the press that a diplomatic triumph had been achieved. Carrington put his foot down in cabinet and insisted that the deal he had signed in Brussels must be honoured. Faced with such a rebellion, well supported by other senior figures in the government, Margaret Thatcher had to back down. It was almost the only occasion in her first year of power when the collective will of her colleagues forced her into a course of action to which she was strongly opposed.

  These early experiences of EEC summitry did not teach Margaret Thatcher the lessons she might have learned from them. She should have realised that progress in European diplomacy is not always achievable by advancing like a battle-tank with all guns firing. She would not have liked the French phrase réculer pour mieux sauter, but she needed to know that more subtle methods of negotiating could achieve the desired results.

  Subtlety did not come easily to her personality. It was one of the reasons why the politics of Europe eventually became her downfall. But whatever annoyance she caused by her trenchant style of negotiating in 1979–1980, she did deliver a budget rebate for Britain that was far larger than anyone had expected. So in the short term, her undiplomatic diplomacy paid off. It was a substantial and enduring achievement.

  A SLOW START TO THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  The highest priority for Margaret Thatcher in foreign policy was strengthening the Anglo-American alliance – a cause in which she had believed passionately ever since her wartime childhood in Grantham when US servicemen had been a memorable presence in the town. But by 1979 the special nature of this alliance was now fading. According to a CIA report written for President Carter in October 1979, ‘The “Special Relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom, finally, has lost much of its meaning. The United States is no longer significantly closer to Britain than to its other major allies.’34 President Jimmy Carter annotated this observation with the comment, ‘Partly accurate, partly fallacious’.35

  The same ambivalence characterised his attitude to the new British Prime Minister. A week after her election, the US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, sent the President a memorandum advising him, ‘It will take patience to deal with Mrs Thatcher’s hard-driving nature and her tendency to hector’.36

  Carter seems to have found this warning accurate. ‘A tough lady! Highly opinionated, strong willed, cannot admit that she doesn’t know something’, was his private comment after seeing her at the G7 summit in Tokyo.37

  Their next encounter came on her visit to Washington in early December. America was in the throes of the Iranian hostage crisis created by the seizure of the US Embassy and fifty-two American diplomats in Tehran. Margaret Thatcher mistakenly took the view that this was a domestic problem for America, on which a visiting foreign leader should not publicly comment. Lord Carrington had to work hard to change her mind. But he succeeded.

  At the arrival ceremonies on the White House lawn, the Prime Minister came out with a ringing statement of solidarity. ‘At times like this you are entitled to look to your friends for support. We are your friends, we do support you. And we shall support you. Let there be no doubt about that.’38

  After these words, which resonated profoundly with Washington’s need for reassurance from close allies, the rest of the Prime Minister’s visit was a triumphal progress. She was serenaded at a White House banquet in her honour by a choir that included Kirk Douglas and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. She was acclaimed for her address to Congress and for her speech to the Foreign Policy Association of New York. There was a section in both audiences that virtually fell in love with Margaret Thatcher’s personality. Her forthright style of answering questions and her robust views on issues ranging from free-market economics to Soviet expansionism created a fan club of American conservatives which grew for many years.

  During the twenty months while they were in office together, President Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher got on better than either of them expected. She admired his Christian faith, scientific knowledge and personal sincerity. But she thought he was inadequate in his understanding of economics and of the Soviet threat.

  After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan he felt she was the weaker partner, sheltering behind legalities and technicalities in order to avoid imposing the toughest possible sanctions. ‘I would hope that you would not be so, excuse me using the word, adamant’, he said to her during a 28 December call to Chequers when the British seemed to be having too many reservations about a US draft of a Security Council Resolution.39 Evidently, the President had not learned in his dealings with the British Prime Minister that it was in her nature to be ‘adamant’ about most things.

  Despite their differences of political and diplomatic outlook, the two leaders did much useful business together. Among their strategic agreements was the replacement of Britain’s ageing Polaris nuclear missile system with the purchase of Trident, and a deal which allowed a large US expansion of its military facilities on the British island of Diego Garcia. But Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher were never kindred spirits. That personal rapport and the revival of the ‘special relationship’ that went with it had to await the election of Ronald Reagan.

  REFLECTION

  The Carrington–Thatcher partnership was a fruitful one for British foreign policy. For all her inexperience, she did jolt him and the diplomatic establishment into more robust stances. For all his amusing cynicism, he was strong enough to stand up to her when she was being impossible. As a result, they jointly had some considerable successes on Rhodesia, on the British budgetary rebate in Europe and in strengthening the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Yet sometimes their co-operation resembled that of a patrician trainer working with a headstrong racehorse. Carrington could cajole or turn her away from what he regarded as a disastrous course. But he never managed to restrain her from her rudeness, particularly to the Germans.

  ‘My dear Peter, please explain me something about Mrs Thatcher’, enquired the new German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, after a couple of bruising European summits with her. ‘Could you tell me why she treats me as though I was the most junior and least important member of her cabinet?’

  ‘My dear Helmut,’ replied Carrington, ‘she treats all of us like that – and you are lucky, for she would be far worse if you really were in her cabinet.’40

  The reasons why Margaret Thatcher never established good relations with the four Franco-German leaders she had to deal with – Giscard, Mitterrand, Schmidt and Kohl – were a combination of the visceral, the political and the personal. As a child of the Second World War, she could not forget the shadows of Nazi Germany and Vichy France. She had moved on, but not nearly as far as most British people who had been teenagers in the dark days of the 1940s when England stood alone.

  What might have convinced her to change her attitudes would have been a willingness on the part of the key European leaders to engage with her in forensic arguments about issues on the agenda of the EEC. But these leaders were broad-brush declarers of intent, while she was a master of detail. This was a gulf that could not be bridged. She became as contemptuous towards them as she could be towards her own ministers when she realised they had not done their homework. There could be no dialogue and no meeting of minds between Margaret Thatcher and those who had not studied their briefs, however eminent they might be.

  The only one of the big four in Europe for whom she developed a soft spot was President Mitterrand. Initially, this was a personal feeling, strengthened later by his helpfulness during the Falklands War. When he made his first visit to Cheq
uers soon after his election in May 1981, the President and the Prime Minister struck up a warm entente cordiale. As Mitterrand was driving away, her Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong, congratulated her on how well the discussions had gone. ‘Yes’, replied Margaret Thatcher, and then, after a short pause, ‘He likes women, you know.’41

  The unexpected comment reflected a strange dimension to Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy. The statesmen she could best do business with were the men she found attractive – Reagan, Gorbachev and Mitterrand. Those she found unattractive, notably the corpulent Kohl, the reptilian Giscard and the anaemic Carter, were consigned to the outer regions of her likes and dislikes. Looks counted with her. This may have had something to do with the differences between the ways she treated her Foreign Secretaries. The lugubrious Francis Pym and the podgy, discursive Geoffrey Howe were not her type. The trim, amusing Lord Carrington had much more appeal to her. Their arguments were vigorous, but they enjoyed each other’s company without the slightest traces of rancour.

  She liked and learned much from Carrington. Yet it is intriguing that she never invited him to rejoin her government after his later honourable resignation over the Falklands,‡ which was only a transient blot on his escutcheon. His restoration to her cabinet would have been easy before or after he became Secretary General of NATO. Perhaps the real problem was that she wanted to be her own Foreign Secretary. She would not have welcomed a foreign-affairs heavyweight in the senior ranks of her government, particularly one who would have managed to restrain her approach to Europe from being so confrontational. This was a pity, because Carrington was a statesman whose partnership with her contributed much to her early successes.