Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Margaret Thatcher kept her distance. ‘It was very kind of you to have rung, Ron’, she replied, noticeably not accepting his apology. ‘I must return to the debate in the House. It is a bit tricky.’

  Realising this was his cue to ride off into the sunset, Reagan delivered his last line: ‘All right! Go get ’em. Eat ’em alive’, he exhorted the Prime Minister.

  ‘Goodbye’, she replied, as the curtain fell on the unhappy Grenada episode of their relationship.23

  It was a misunderstanding on both sides. The White House never grasped the British sensitivities about the Commonwealth, the role of the Queen (who was said to be much offended) or the importance of not misleading Parliament, as Sir Geoffrey Howe had inadvertently done. Margaret Thatcher was excessively hurt about not being let into the secret by Reagan.

  ‘That man! After all I’ve done for him, he didn’t even consult me’, she grumbled to one of her Downing Street voices on security issues, Brian Crozier.24

  She also exaggerated the illegal bellicosity of the invasion, telling the Irish Taioseach, Garret FitzGerald, that Grenada was as bad as the Soviet take-overs of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. ‘The Americans are worse than the Soviets’, she claimed.25

  In reality, the return to stability of Grenada was a limited and brief operation of US military power. After her ruffled feathers had been given time to settle, Margaret Thatcher came to realise this herself. But she also realised that she had to put in some extra spadework to get the ‘special relationship’ back on track.

  1984 began badly for Anglo-American relations. There was a tiff about retaliatory action by US forces in Lebanon, punishing the Syrians for their role in terrorist attacks on a US Marine barracks in Beirut. Margaret Thatcher unsuccessfully urged caution and was criticised inside the White House for not standing firm with the US.

  A few weeks later a visit to Washington by President Mitterrand was presented as though France was America’s new best friend in the Western alliance. Influential commentators were tipped the wink by the White House that the Reagan–Thatcher honeymoon was fading. The Economist published a two-part report on the dire straits of their relations under the headline ‘Say Something, If Only Goodbye’.26 An unnamed White House source was quoted as saying in the context of Grenada, ‘As usual, our boys lost their lives saving the world from communism, and all we get from London is prissy criticism’.27

  Although no great admirer of the magazine, the Prime Minister read these articles and did not enjoy being castigated for her ‘prissy criticism’. She began looking for an opportunity to mend her fences with the President, and took it with skill when he came to London for the G7 Economic Summit in June.

  Ronald Reagan was effectively running for re-election in the summer of 1984, and the London summit provided him with a boost to his prospects. However, this was not a certain outcome because several of the G7 leaders wished to use the event as an opportunity to attack US economic policy for its high interest rates and soaring budget deficit. The Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and French President François Mitterrand led the charge against the US President, who was not at his best in explaining America’s role in the world economy.

  There was a real danger that the G7 communiqué would criticise the US economic strategy, but from the chair Margaret Thatcher blocked this by acting as the President’s shield, defender and restored best friend. ‘Margaret handled the meetings brilliantly’, wrote Reagan in his diary. ‘More protests by Pierre and François. There was blood on the floor, but not ours.’28

  Some of the protests at the summit were wounding to the Prime Minister, who came in for scathing criticism from Pierre Trudeau for her ‘heavy-handed and undemocratic’29 conduct of the meeting in the chair. Reagan thought the Canadian Premier was out of line and expressed his sympathy to Margaret Thatcher as they left the room. ‘Oh, women know when men are being childish’, she riposted.30

  Further indications of restored harmony between the British and American leaders came at the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landings, where the President’s speech at Pointe du Hoc on 6 June brought tears to Margaret Thatcher’s eyes. Tears of laughter followed three nights later when Reagan the actor memorably recited ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother at a Buckingham Palace dinner party, after discovering that she knew and loved the poems of Robert W. Service.

  Over the next few months, personal messages, handwritten notes and phone calls flowed both ways between No. 10 and the Oval Office. They covered such topics as his support during the miners’ strike, his sympathy after the Brighton bombing and her best wishes for his re-election. ‘I’ve got my fingers crossed, my toes crossed, my everything crossed’, Thatcher told Sandra Day O’Connor,* giving a pantomime performance to America’s first woman Supreme Court Justice from Britain’s first woman Prime Minister31 a few days before the 1984 presidential election. Reagan won it by a landslide.

  There were, however, at least two more episodes in which the wires of the ‘special relationship’ nearly got crossed. They were the bombing of Libya and the offer of a nuclear-free world to Mikhail Gorbachev.†

  THE BOMBING OF LIBYA

  Of all the tests of commitment to the Anglo-American alliance that Margaret Thatcher had to face, the bombing of Libya was the one she passed with the boldest resolve. The decisions she had to take were not easy. But they brought her the greenest of garlands in Washington.

  In April 1986, President Reagan decided to order an air strike against Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli in retaliation for various acts of state-sponsored Libyan terrorism in Europe. The final provocation was a bomb attack on a West Berlin nightclub on 5 April. The La Belle discotheque was frequented by US servicemen and was packed with nearly 500 people. Two Americans and a Turkish civilian died. Over 230 people were injured, including fifty off-duty US soldiers. The Americans requested permission for their bases in Britain to be used by the F1-11 aircraft leading the retaliatory raid.

  Margaret Thatcher was in a weakened position on the UK domestic scene because of the Westland affair and other troubles.‡ She also had initial reservations about the legality of the American raid, which was difficult to justify as an act of self-defence within the terms of the UN Charter. When she started to take soundings among her cabinet, she found that some of her staunchest allies could not be depended on to support the proposed US action. The Foreign Office was strongly against it, believing that British embassies across the Middle East would be burned and that British interests in the region would be ruined.

  In the middle of these secret internal arguments that were raging in Whitehall on Monday 14 April, the Prime Minister called me into her room at the House of Commons to ask what I thought would be the effect of the use of Britain’s USAF bases on the decision-makers in Saudi Arabia – particularly on King Fahd, whom I knew well.

  ‘The Saudis will criticise Britain publicly, but that will be all’, I replied. ‘King Fahd loathes Gaddafi and will privately be far from sorry. There will be no repercussions commercially or diplomatically.’32 Margaret Thatcher asked me one or two supplementary questions but reacted non-committally. In fact, she had already made up her mind to authorise the use of Britain’s bases after talks at the weekend with General Vernon Walters, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, who had been sent to London as a special presidential envoy.

  According to her Foreign Affairs Private Secretary, Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher had slept on the problem overnight. ‘She came down to the office early next morning and announced that we simply must accede to the American request: “That’s what Allies are for.” ’33

  All the other American allies in Europe had a different opinion. Only Britain granted the United States F1-11 aircraft overflying rights or related facilities. This isolation from France, Germany, Spain and Italy fortified rather than diminished Margaret Thatcher’s resolve. Yet she knew she would be facing a lot of trouble from public media and parliamentary opinion for h
er solidarity with President Reagan. When the bombers were on their way from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk to Tripoli, she seemed uncharacteristically nervous. As she attended a book launch at the offices of The Economist to celebrate the publication of Walter Bagehot’s works edited by Norman St John-Stevas, the magazine’s editor, Andrew Knight, expressed his concern about how pale she looked. ‘Since my complexion is never ruddy, I must have appeared like Banquo’s ghost’, she later recalled.34

  Despite her wan appearance and Libyan worries, Margaret Thatcher put on a sparkling performance at the book launch with elegant praise for both Bagehot and Norman St John-Stevas. It was the last friendly reception she received for some time.

  Although the American airstrike was successful, the inevitable civilian casualties resulted in a dreadful public relations backlash. Even the Prime Minister’s most loyal ministers showed signs of rebellion. Complaints about the US action and about not being consulted as a cabinet came from Norman Tebbit, Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd, John Biffen and Kenneth Baker. But the Prime Minister stood firm, telling her colleagues: ‘This is the right decision in the long-term interests of Britain. The US keeps hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe to defend Europe. She is entitled to ask to use our bases.’35

  If her reception in the cabinet was difficult, it was far rougher in the House of Commons on the afternoon following the raid. She was almost universally condemned with the tone set by the Liberal Party Leader, David Steel, who told the Prime Minister that she had turned ‘the British bulldog into a Reagan poodle’.36

  As it happened, the only supportive voice on either side of the House was my own. I thanked her during Prime Minister’s Questions for ‘the difficult but wholly correct decision’.37 The rest was mostly hostility. After the exchanges, Ted Heath chided me far from pleasantly in the Members’ Lobby: ‘Sucking up to the headmistress, I suppose.’38

  In fact, the ‘headmistress’ turned out to be vindicated by subsequent events. The outrage of Colonel Gaddafi’s rhetoric after the raid was followed by a noticeable decline in Libyan terrorism for several years. The indignation in Britain turned out to be ephemeral, whereas the gratitude from Washington was euphoric. President Reagan, whose poll approval ratings in the US soared to 77 per cent for his decision to authorise the air strike, was loud in his praise for his favourite ally. ‘PM Thatcher as always was right solidly behind us’, he said.39 The New York Times reflected the national mood with a front-page story headlined ‘Anglophilia Rules’.40

  On Capitol Hill there was an unexpected bonus for British interests, when the Senate passed a revised US–British extradition treaty that removed the immunity for terrorists who claimed that their crimes had been politically motivated. This revision had been stuck in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since July 1985, thanks to Irish lobby support for IRA suspects seeking protection from extradition.

  After Libya, that support crumbled and Reagan himself spelt out the message in a Radio Address to the Nation on Terrorism: ‘Rejection of this treaty would be an affront to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one European leader who at great political risk stood shoulder to shoulder with us during our operations against Gadhafi’s terrorism.’41

  In that atmosphere the Senate ratified the UK–US Supplementary Extradition Treaty by eighty-seven votes to ten. President Reagan called Margaret Thatcher at a dinner party in London to give her the good news. He recorded in his diary, ‘She’s delighted’.42

  REFLECTION

  The Libyan episode need not have become the bellwether test of the ‘special relationship’, but it did. The United States could have inflicted just as much damage on Libyan compounds and installations from carrier-based aircraft, or from F-111s using longer in-flight refuelling arrangements. But there was something about Margaret Thatcher’s lonely courage in the face of public hostility towards their cause that won the hearts of the American people. She was already a standard bearer to political conservatives for her free-market economic policies.

  Libya made her a popular heroine on a far wider front. Her instinctive belief, ‘that’s what Allies are for’, was a personal credo not a political calculation. It was the rock on which the equally instinctive Ronald Reagan built his trust in her.

  Although there were to be other squalls and stormy moments in their partnership – not least over how to handle disarmament proposals to the Soviet Union – the foundations of that rock always stayed firm. Because of it, Margaret Thatcher has a special place in the history of the ‘special relationship’.

  ________________

  * Sandra Day O’Connor (1930–), United States Supreme Court justice, 1981–2006. Prior to her appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she was a judge in Arizona.

  † See Chapter 28.

  ‡ See Chapter 29.

  28

  Starting to win the Cold War

  WHY THE IRON LADY WAS FOR TURNING

  A surprising visitor to No. 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1982 was the former US President Richard Nixon.* He was still regarded as ‘disgraced’ in his own country as the scars from his resignation over Watergate were far from healed. But Margaret Thatcher held Nixon’s foreign-policy expertise in high esteem. So in their hour-long one-on-one talk she picked his brain on a subject he was well qualified to discuss – how to engage with the Soviet Union at a time when its Cold War rhetoric seemed more hostile to the West than ever before. Nixon advised her:

  The Soviets will listen to you before they listen to us. They see you as strong, they see you as a tough right winger, which they always respect. They know you’ve got a lot of clout with our, frankly, inexperienced White House. With your credentials, you can bring a new realism into East–West relations which are right now stuck in a ruck.1

  Nixon was skilful at flattering the British Prime Minister. He also had a perceptive feel for the statecraft of dealing with the Soviet Union. So Margaret Thatcher listened carefully to his advice, which included pithy one-liners such as: ‘Get to know your enemy’; ‘Find the young comers in the Kremlin’; ‘Unsettle the satellites’; ‘Contain, confront, and then be ready to make deals for hard headed détente’.2

  The Nixon recommendations seem to have been heeded by Margaret Thatcher. They were a reminder that in this area of foreign policy the Iron Lady was a listening Lady. She may have been overly dismissive towards the predictable advice she received from the Foreign Office, but she did pay a lot of attention to her voices who spoke or wrote to her about the Soviet Union. Besides Nixon, they included Brian Crozier, Robert Conquest, Hugh Thomas, Robert Moss and the Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits. They were pushing at an unexpectedly open door to the Prime Minister’s mind. For, well ahead of most of her contemporaries, Margaret Thatcher instinctively felt that change was coming to the Soviet Union. She was searching for an agent of such change long before she met Mikhail Gorbachev.

  The first tangible evidence of her search came when she organised a Chequers seminar on the Soviet Union in September 1983. Her reaction to the suggested list of invitees was contemptuous, as she minuted:

  This is NOT the way I want it. I am not interested in gathering in every junior minister, nor everyone who has ever dealt with the subject at the FO. The FO must do their preparation before. I want also some people who have really studied Russia – the Russian mind – and who have some experience of living there. More than half the people on the list know less than I do.3

  Accelerated by this prime ministerial prodding, the Chequers seminar assembled some outstanding people and papers. However, only one of them, Canon Michael Bourdeaux,† dared to predict that, ‘We may one day see the collapse of the Soviet system from within’.4 The general summary, whose key sentence was underlined by Margaret Thatcher, concluded that although the Soviet leadership faced many problems, these were not ‘on such a scale as to compel them to change course drastically, still less change the system’.5

  Despite this pessimism within the foreign-policy establishment, Margaret Th
atcher reiterated her belief that somewhere within the monolithic and apparently immobile Soviet system there were individuals of spirit who wanted to bring about change. She mentioned in this context writers and dissidents. But were there any kindred reformers within the government? Professor Archie Brown,‡ one of the external Soviet experts invited to Chequers, reported that the newest and youngest member of the Politburo was ‘The most hopeful choice from the point of view of both Soviet citizens and the outside world’. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Identifying him at this early stage meant ‘our September seminar at Chequers was, therefore, more important than we knew’, according to the Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, who came to see Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent relations with Gorbachev as ‘her greatest achievement in Foreign Affairs’.6

  At the time, however, the identification of Gorbachev was no more than a vaguely hopeful sighting on the long-distance radar screen of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy. This was becoming more and more personalised. She kept her diplomatic cards increasingly tightly held within No. 10. In late 1983 she appointed a new private secretary, Charles Powell, who was to become her closest aide and confidant for the last seven years of her premiership.

  Charles Powell had the appearance of a quintessentially Foreign Office man, but he appealed to Margaret Thatcher because of his steeliness of character and originality of mind. Moreover, his personal views were in harmony with her political purposes.

  They first struck up a rapport in Bonn in 1975. She was making her first visit to Germany as Leader of the Opposition. It fell to Powell as First Secretary at the British Embassy to arrange her schedule. It culminated in them both sitting up late into the night to hear the result of the Woolwich West by-election – a surprise gain for the Conservatives which raised the leader’s spirits. Most of the talking that evening was done by the vivacious Mrs Carla Powell for whom Margaret Thatcher developed a life-long affection. She also took a favourable view of the thirty-three-year old Charles Powell, whose good looks, Oxford first and unorthodox opinions on the primacy of British national interests all impressed her.