Five days after the opening of the Aspen conference, Margaret Thatcher cut short a planned family holiday in Colorado in order to go to Washington for further talks on the Iraq crisis at the White House. It had been widely speculated that her influence with the new administration was waning because she did not see eye to eye with President Bush on German reunification. Although this disagreement was real, it did not prevent Margaret Thatcher from moving into her familiar role of presidential confidante on planning the international response to the invasion of Kuwait during her visit to Washington on 6 August. As she recalled: ‘For all the friendship and co-operation I had had from President Reagan, I was never taken into the Americans’ confidence more than I was during the two hours or so I spent that afternoon at the White House.’2
The Oval Office meeting began a highly restricted session attended by the President, the Prime Minister and their key aides, Brent Scowcroft, US National Security Adviser, and Charles Powell. Margaret Thatcher’s main concern was how to protect Saudi Arabia. With Iraqi tanks moving up to the Saudi border, she thought the main danger was that the oil-rich kingdom would be invaded before its rulers formally asked the West for help. Fortunately, King Fahd did make the request quickly and within twenty-four hours the 82nd Airborne Division and forty-eight USAF F-15 fighters had arrived in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.
Margaret Thatcher was the first to see that limited deterrence might not be enough. She was as clear in her assessment of Saddam Hussein as she had been in her view of General Galtieri. She believed that Iraqi troops would never leave Kuwait until they were thrown out and she thought the West must remain in a state of maximum preparedness to prevent Saddam from extending his invasion into Saudi Arabia. As she put it in a minute to her Defence Secretary, Tom King, on 12 April: ‘We thought that Iraq would not move into Kuwait, although their forces were massing on the border. Let us not make the same mistake again. They may move into Saudi Arabia. We must be ready.’3
She was as good as her written word. During August, Britain dispatched one squadron of Tornado and one squadron of Jaguar combat aircraft to the region, supported by AWACs and tanker planes. The Prime Minister also authorised the despatch of the 7th Armoured Brigade, a self-supporting force of 7,500 men, including 120 tanks, a regiment of Field Artillery, a battalion of armoured infantry and anti-tank helicopters. ‘My heavens, a marvellous commitment, this is really something’,4 said President Bush when she told him of Britain’s decision, which was supported by a Commons vote of 437 to thirty-five.5
Although most of her moves were made within the secret confines of diplomatic contacts and military preparations, Margaret Thatcher’s early contributions to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein were of pivotal importance. Fortified by her experiences during the Falklands conflict, she was at the top of her game in terms of thinking several moves ahead. Three of her initiatives deserve particular mention.
First, she insisted on the appointment of General Sir Peter de la Billière to be the commander of UK forces in the Gulf. She had known him since they struck up a good rapport in the aftermath of the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1980, when he had been in command of the SAS. She admired both his leadership and his linguistic skills in Arabic. He was not the choice of the Ministry of Defence to be commander in the Gulf, partly because he was regarded as something of a maverick, and partly because he was one week away from retirement. But Margaret Thatcher beat off these objections, saying that she needed ‘a fighting General’, and that if Sir Peter was not appointed, she would make him her personal adviser on military affairs at No. 10. This threat caused the Ministry of Defence to beat a retreat. General Peter de la Billière was quickly appointed Commander of UK forces in the Gulf.6
Second, the Prime Minister conducted a vigorous diplomatic battle to achieve unity among Arab governments and rulers, many of whom she had come to know well. King Hussein of Jordan, who surprised everyone by supporting the Iraqi invasion, was given a right royal handbagging when he came to lunch with the Prime Minister on 31 August. It appeared to weaken his already faltering backing for Saddam Hussein.7
Across the Middle East, Margaret Thatcher was credited for the speed and strength of the West’s response to the invasion of Kuwait. Her Defence Secretary, Tom King, made an early visit to the region as the military build up got under way. ‘The Gulf rulers were all certain that it was because she persuaded President Bush at Aspen to move immediately that Saddam did not move on into Saudi Arabia’,8 he recalled.
The same view was held by the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, who was frequently telephoned by Margaret Thatcher with advice and promises of support. A year after the conflict, I had an audience with the king in Riyadh, who said, ‘Your Prime Minister was terrific – she strengthened me, she strengthened President Bush and she helped to unite the whole coalition against Saddam’.9
In the early stages of these preparatory moves I had a conversation about the Kuwait crisis with Margaret Thatcher after Ian Gow’s funeral on 8 August. I found her resolve and commitment to the inevitable war with Saddam to be positively Churchillian. At a time when her Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was holding the optimistic view that sanctions and military pressures would cause the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait, the Prime Minister’s reaction was a beacon of clarity. ‘We will have to fight Saddam, you mark my words’, she said.10
Convinced of this outcome of events, she devoted a huge amount of time and effort in her last four months of power to preparing Britain and its coalition partners for the conflict. ‘I found myself reliving in an only slightly different form my experiences of the build-up to the battle for the Falklands’, she recalled.11 With a small group of ministers and service chiefs, she made almost daily decisions on selecting military targets, wording UN resolutions and questioning the military about the quality of their equipment. Her grilling of the directors of Vickers about the reliability of the Challenger tank became a legend in company folklore.
One of her last major decisions as Prime Minister was to double the British commitment to the Gulf War preparations to 30,000 men, an upgrade from a brigade to a division. It was ratified by the cabinet at their historic meeting on 22 November, the day when she announced her resignation as Prime Minister.
Such was the febrile state of parliamentary opinion on domestic issues in the autumn of 1990 that the Prime Minister’s preparations for the defeat of Saddam Hussein were seen as a sideshow. But the fact that Britain, the United States and their coalition partners were so ready and so determined to restore the lawful government of Kuwait deserves to be recorded in history as another of Margaret Thatcher’s finest hours, even though she was forced out of office five months before the eventual victory in the Gulf War.
THE POISON OF THE POLL TAX
The year 1990 was when the poll tax poisoned the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and her backbenchers. The month of March was the turning point. The rot started with a disastrous by-election in Mid Staffordshire on 22 March. When Conservative MPs saw a Tory majority of 14,654 converted into a Labour gain by 9,449, many of them were aghast; not only about their own electoral prospects, but even more about the root cause of the 21 per cent swing against the government – which they identified as the growing unpopularity of the new tax.12
On 31 March, the day before the introduction of the Community Charge in England and Wales, a demonstration at Trafalgar Square erupted into serious rioting, with 341 arrests and 331 police officers, plus eighty-six members of the public injured.13 Although Margaret Thatcher rightly blamed the violence on left-wing militants, there was almost as much non-violent anger in the Tory shires when the first poll tax bills arrived. MPs’ post-bags were full of furious letters demanding a U-turn.
Margaret Thatcher had executed many a discreet reversal of policy during her eleven years as Prime Minister, but this was a U-turn too far. The problem was that she had gone out on such a limb with her passionate advocacy for her flagship tax. This zeal was to prove her und
oing. Unable to back down, she tried to alleviate the effects of the tax with a series of complicated emasculations. They included transitional relief measures, capping proposals, and a root and branch review carried out by the new Secretary of State for the Environment, Chris Patten. However, the most important of the changes required legislation, and it looked as though the mood on the back benches was so anti-poll tax that no measure except dropping the tax would pass through the House. It was stand-off time between the Prime Minister and her party in Parliament.
Meanwhile the political situation in the country continued to deteriorate. Opinion polls in April showed that Labour was enjoying a 24.5 per cent lead over the Conservatives. Margaret Thatcher’s personal ratings plummeted to 23 per cent, even worse than her low point in 1981, when she had been deemed to be the most unpopular prime minister ever.14
On 4 May 1990 there were English local government elections that confirmed to the Prime Minister’s critics that her unpopularity was increasing. The Tories lost control of another twelve councils and could only hold on to 32 per cent of the overall vote. However, there were some pleasant surprises amidst the general disaster. A handful of councils, which had been pursuing a strategy of Thatcherite expenditure cuts, demonstrated that their good housekeeping could result in low Community Charge figures and electoral popularity. These local authorities, which included Wandsworth, Westminster, Hastings, Thanet, Trafford and Southend, held on to their Conservative majorities. Margaret Thatcher seized on these scraps of good electoral news as evidence that ‘the Community Charge is beginning to work. It will increasingly bring the profligate and inefficient to book’.15
Although she may well have been right about this, a growing number of Tory MPs were in no mood to give their leader time to work out solutions to the poll tax problems. An alarmist atmosphere began to take root at meetings of the 1922 Committee and other party committees. Late at night around the bars on the House of Commons terrace, a spirit of sauve qui peut emerged among the defeatist tendency of colleagues who had convinced themselves that they would lose their seats in two years time. A whispering campaign got under way with the message that both the poll tax and the Prime Minister should go.
This was by no means a one-way street. In the country, there was evidence to suggest that the tide was turning in Margaret Thatcher’s direction. Opinion polls indicated that Labour’s lead had been halved, and that the Prime Minister was well ahead of the opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, on the question of ‘Who would you trust to run the country?’ There was also a solid hard core of government loyalists at Westminster who grew increasingly angry at the whisperers and the trouble-stirrers associated with Michael Heseltine.
Amidst the growing tension, the loyalists were fond of quoting two lines from a previous era of Tory infighting: ‘Steady the Buffs’ and ‘Pro bono publico, no bloody panico’. But in the volatile mood among at least a third of Conservative MPs in the summer of 1990, there was too little steadiness and too much ‘panico’.*
The government did have one stroke of luck in the middle of the poll tax crisis. On the night of 13 June, the Prime Minister was working her way through her pile of red boxes when she came across a note from her private secretary, reporting on a telephone call received earlier in the evening from government lawyers. They advised, on the basis of a recent court judgment, that many local authorities could have their spending capped under the existing legislation, if the government set an early figure for what it deemed to be ‘excessive’ spending.16
Margaret Thatcher went into overdrive once this legal view was established as watertight. A cabinet committee decided to cap local authorities if their rate of spending resulted in a Community Charge above £379. This was an expensive solution requiring extra public expenditure of £3 billion. Yet it was a workable outcome, which would probably have allowed the new Community Charge to bed down and become established.17 But the ‘panico’ faction among the fractious Tory back-benchers was in no mood to listen to compromise solutions. They wanted the poll tax scrapped – period. So the summer of discontent rumbled on, and Margaret Thatcher remained vulnerable.
HER LAST ROW ON EUROPE
Before Margaret Thatcher’s last great row with Europe she made an important concession. She agreed to join the ERM. Her persuader in chief for this volte- face was John Major, who had become convinced of the case for entry by his Treasury officials and by the Bank of England. Coaxing the Prime Minister towards the view that the time was right was a difficult and sensitive enterprise. Douglas Hurd was also a strong advocate of it. As she listened to her two most senior ministers, Margaret Thatcher must have had at the back of her mind the realisation that she could not possibly afford to lose another Chancellor or another Foreign Secretary. Even though Major and Hurd were too gentlemanly to play this card, she was aware that the ace of trumps was up their sleeve. So she began to move.
According to her memoirs, her movement was reluctant. But this was revisionism. Her Chancellor John Major recalled:
It is a myth to say that she was un-persuaded. She had come to realise that there was no other way of getting inflation down that was likely to be successful. When we were approaching the decision to go in she actually brought forward the announcement by one week. She also advocated a higher and therefore more punitive sterling–Deutschmark exchange rate because she wanted to bear down on inflation even harder. These were not the actions of a prime minister being bullied into joining the ERM. The fact of the matter is that she was enthusiastic and committed on the day we joined. She changed her mind afterwards.18
The only obstacle to Margaret Thatcher’s conversion to joining the ERM was her insistence that the announcement of entry should be accompanied by the announcement of an interest-rate cut. Although both the Treasury and the Bank of England opposed this linkage on economic grounds, the Prime Minister’s view prevailed. She used the one point reduction in interest rates as her political fig leaf. When she made the announcement outside No. 10 with her Chancellor standing silently beside her, Margaret Thatcher made it sound as though the interest-rate cut and the ERM entry were two sides of the same coin, as she claimed, ‘The fact that our policies are working and are seen to be working have made both these decisions possible’.19
The instant reaction by politicians of all parties and by the media bordered on the ecstatic. Neil Kinnock welcomed the ERM decision as ‘momentous’. Many newspaper commentators used similar adjectives. The CBI and the TUC applauded. The stock market soared. But there were a few dissenting voices. William Keegan, Economics Editor of the Observer, predicted trouble because Britain had entered at too high a rate (DM2.95).20 John Major’s Parliamentary Private Secretary Tony Favell MP resigned in protest.21 Teddy Taylor and other leaders of the Conservative European Reform Group demanded to know what our exit strategy was if ERM pressures became intolerable.
Margaret Thatcher listened with some sympathy to these Eurosceptic concerns, saying privately that we could easily realign. She would not favour using either significant reserves or higher interest rates to defend the exchange rate. Her off the record comments were a revealing indication of her lack of commitment to the policy she had announced a few days earlier. But she justified the decision to enter the ERM on the curious grounds that it would make it easier for her to continue to block moves toward European Monetary Union (EMU).
This last view was soon shown to be flawed. It was exposed by what became known as the ‘Italian ambush’ at a meeting of the European Council in Rome on 28 October. At this summit, contrary to all prior expectations and assurances, the Italians brought forward a firm timetable for implementing EMU. They suddenly proposed that the Delors Plan for stage two of monetary union should start on 1 January 1994, and that the single currency should begin in 2000. This zeal for announcing a fast track towards a monetary and political union that had not been agreed became infectious.
The leaders of eleven member states, headed by Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand, were all r
eady to sign up to the Italian timetable on the spot. Britain was isolated. The Prime Minister was shocked to be in this position, but had no qualms about standing alone. Asked what she felt about being the sole objector among twelve member states to the plan, her reply was: ‘Sorry for the other eleven!’22
The way she said ‘No’ added insult to injury. At her press conference in Rome, she let fly. She attacked the Italians for managing the summit incompetently, declaring it to be ‘a mess’.23 She taunted the Commission for proposing firm timetables for implementing schemes for monetary and political union, but without receiving any agreement on the substance of these schemes. ‘People who get on a train like that deserve to be taken for a ride’, she declared, adding that the train appeared to be heading for ‘cloud cuckoo land’.
These robustly expressed criticisms were right. The Italian ambush had been chaotic and procedurally absurd. The cart of Euro-dreams had been put before the horse of substantive negotiations on EMU, and before a number of far more pressing issues such as the GATT† round of negotiations and the crisis in the Gulf. Even the pro-European Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was shocked by the management of the summit and by the muddle of its declaratory outcome.
By the time the Prime Minister made a statement on the European Council to the House of Commons twenty-four hours after her return to London, she was riding on a high horse of righteous indignation. She was not merely smarting from the Italian ambush. She had decided in her mind that the outcome of the meeting marked what she called the beginning of ‘the ultimate battle for the future of the Community’.24 It was a battle she was determined not to lose.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 76
