I had discussed the situation with Norman Lamont, an early supporter whose job with Rothschilds enabled him to keep me in touch with what was going on in the City and abroad, and who had just returned from the United States where he had spoken to politicians, officials and opinion-formers. I gained the impression, which proved accurate, that the Ford Administration’s confidence had started modestly to increase, which was giving them all the more opportunity to worry about what was happening in Britain. The Prime Minister, who had recently been in Washington, had done nothing to improve perceptions by claiming that all our difficulties were grossly exaggerated. Something different and more serious was expected. I resolved to provide it.
Gordon Reece flew on ahead of me to New York in order to set up the media arrangements. Just before I left London he telephoned to say that expectations of my visit were now so high that I should make the first speech I was to deliver — to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York — a blockbuster rather than, as planned, a low-key performance with the main speech coming later in Washington. This required frenzied last-minute speech-rewriting with Adam Ridley, and it showed in the text. Most of the speech struck exactly the right note. It began by taking head-on the American comments on the sorry state of contemporary Britain and treating them seriously. I then drew attention to what I called ‘the progressive consensus, the doctrine that the state should be active on many fronts in promoting equality: in the provision of social welfare and in the redistribution of wealth and incomes’. There followed a detailed analysis of its effects in the form of over-taxation, the discouragement of enterprise, the squeeze on profits, the defrauding of savers by inflation and negative interest rates and the apparently inexorable growth of the public sector and public spending.
Unfortunately, tacked on to the draft and, far more seriously, to the ‘final’ version issued to the press by Conservative Central Office was a passage about public expenditure constraints requiring tough, painful decisions such as limiting the number of kidney machines. Kidney machines were in fact already limited in number as part of the unacknowledged rationing of health treatment under Labour. Nevertheless, a frank statement of it — particularly in the form of a throwaway line — was asking for trouble. In the helter-skelter preparations Adam and I let it through. Luckily, when Gordon in New York saw a copy of the speech he immediately understood the potential damage and removed the offending part. All press releases are subject to the usually formal qualification ‘check against delivery’, so he was also able to ring round Fleet Street to tell the editors that the page in question, although part of the press release they had received from Central Office, was not being used and so should not be covered. They had sufficient respect for him to comply; and since the front page of the Sun had already provisionally been dominated by the headline ‘Let ‘em Die, Says Maggie’ before it was replaced with something blander, it was a narrow escape.
In fact, the main message of the speech was given maximum attention on both sides of the Atlantic. I was promptly attacked back home by the Labour Government for running Britain down abroad. In fact, the message I was bringing to America about Britain was essentially one of hope, namely that the nation’s potential was great enough to withstand even the effects of socialism. The criticism from the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who quaintly criticized me later for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into my American speeches, found a faithful echo in the British Embassy where I was staying. A senior member of the Embassy staff briefed the American press against me. Gordon Reece quickly discovered what was happening, and there was a sharp exchange of letters on the subject between me and Jim Callaghan when I returned to England.
Aware of the attempt to try to cast me in this light, I used my speech to the National Press Club in Washington to point out that if the present socialist policies were abandoned, Britain had underlying strengths which would ensure its swift recovery. A shift of popular opinion against the far Left, the extent of our energy reserves and the strength of our scientific potential — shown by seventy-two Nobel Prizes, more than France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium put together — all justified long-term optimism.
Now, slowly, we are finding our way. It is true that the reports about Britain still reflect a serious situation, and they are right to do so. But a change is coming over us… I see some signs that our people are ready to make the tough choice, to follow the harder road. We are still the same people who have fought for freedom, and won. The spirit of adventure, the inventiveness, the determination are still strands in our character. We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and the will to win through.
In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to détente.
I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.
I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.
In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.
On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, this would not do. As Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the more politically conducive Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of The Economist’s, Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters, one of the founders of the National Association for Freedom set up to combat overweening trade union power, and destined to be a best-selling novelist, Robert turned out to be an ideal choice.
The speech which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defe
nce at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’. It also offered an analysis of Soviet intentions different from that of the proponents of détente.
Russia is ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. In any case, if they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.
The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The Daily Telegraph entitled its editorial comment ‘The Truth About Russia’. The Times admitted that ‘there has been complacency in the West’. Nor was the Soviet reaction long in coming. The Soviet Embassy wrote a letter to Reggie Maudling, and the Ambassador called on the Foreign Office to protest in person. A stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs. But it was some apparatchik in the office of Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, his imagination surpassing his judgement, who coined the description of me as ‘The Iron Lady’.
It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the Western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time of the most grotesque misjudgements. This was one of them. When Gordon Reece read on the Press Association tapes what Red Star had said he was ecstatic and rushed into my office to tell me about it. I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent. They never did me a greater favour.
A few days later I visited the British Army on the Rhine, where my Kensington speech ensured me a warm reception. I was photographed driving a tank, which did me no harm at all at home either. What the outside world did not know was that in the course of this visit my career almost ended even more dramatically than it was to in November 1990.
Cranley Onslow, one of the Party’s Defence spokesmen, Richard Ryder and I were shown aboard an elderly two-engine propeller-driven transport aircraft to fly from the British base at Rheindalen to Oerlinghausen where we were to stay the night. (The plan had been to fly by helicopter, but the weather was not good enough.) Shortly after take-off I took my draft speech out of my briefcase and started to work on it. Some time later I became conscious of an irregularity in the noisy drumming of the engines. It was cold in the cabin. Outside there was thick freezing fog, and looking more closely I could see ice forming on the wings. At this point one of the crew came back to say that there was a problem and we would have to return to Rheindalen. I could sense from his manner that it was serious and I pressed to know exactly what the trouble was. It turned out that with the fog so thick the pilot could not be sure of his bearings. There was more. We were apparently now flying blind through a range of mountains. This was why the pilot had kept our speed to the minimum, slowing until the aircraft threatened to stall, in the hope that the fog might break and he could see his way out of trouble. Worse still, the instrument measuring our air speed had failed. I stopped working on the speech and put it away carefully in my briefcase, leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about matters even more important than politics. Somehow, we managed to get back to Rheindalen. I was never more relieved to feel tarmac under my feet.
If my feet were on the ground metaphysically as well, this was in part because I had followed closely the speeches and writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn since he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. But the first time I saw and heard him speak was in an interview he gave to Michael Charlton on the BBC television programme Panorama in March 1976. It made a deep impression on me; I subsequently kept the transcript amid the bundle of papers I regularly referred to when in need of inspiration.
The predominant Western view at the time was that in the end the Soviet system would, by a process of ‘convergence’, turn into something not very different from Western society, which would itself evolve in the direction of social democracy. Solzhenitsyn challenged this complacency. The real question, according to him, was not whether and how the Soviet system would change, but rather whether the West itself could survive. This was not because of the strengths of communism but rather because of the weakness and cowardice of Western leaders. Until a few years before the cause of the dissidents in the USSR had been making real if slow headway. But now the Western nations had allowed the balance to shift dramatically against freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Helsinki process made my own, which had caused such controversy the previous year, pale into banality. Solzhenitsyn asked:
How do you explain that over the last few months there has been hardly any news coming out of the Soviet Union of the continuing persecution of dissidents? If you will forgive me, I will answer this myself. The journalists have bowed to the spirit of Helsinki. I know for a fact that Western journalists in Moscow, who have been given the right of freer movement, in return for this, and because of the spirit of Helsinki, no longer accept information about new persecutions of dissidents in the Soviet Union. What does the spirit of Helsinki and the spirit of détente mean for us within the Soviet Union? The strengthening of totalitarianism.
As I have noted, the revival of Western morale and defence preparedness altered this entire equation. But Solzhenitsyn’s words are an interesting testimony to the corrosive effect of Helsinki under conditions of détente.
Now, however, the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States at the end of 1976 brought to the White House a man who put human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda. One could at least be sure that he would not make the mistake of his predecessor, who had refused to meet Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.
President Carter was soon to be tested. In January 1977 the text of ‘Charter 77’, the manifesto of the Czech dissidents, was smuggled into West Germany and published. The following month Jimmy Carter wrote personally to Professor Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and leading dissident. This change of tone was reassuring.
But I soon became worried about two other aspects of the Carter Administration’s approach to foreign policy. First, human rights issues were treated without reference to broader political and strategic considerations, and indeed with some moral naivete. Even the most idealistic proponent of a policy inspired by moral considerations has to be practical. There were many regimes which abused human rights — for example, some military governments in Latin America and the Middle East — but which may have been less oppressive than the totalitarian alternative.
Moreover, the primary duty a free country owes, not just to itself but to countries which are unfree, is to survive. So there is no need to apologize for supporting an unsavoury regime which temporarily serves larger Western interests, although we should always use our influence to ameliorate its worst abuses. Unfortunately, muddled thinking and divisions within the Carter Administration prevented it from pursuing such a balanced approach. As we shall see, the Carter stress on human rights in Iran helped to undermine the Shah and to replace him with the far more oppressive, and anti-Western, r
egime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Pascal points out, the first principle of morality is thinking clearly. And in this case failing to think clearly produced a markedly worse result for both human rights and Western interests.
My second criticism was that human rights policy cannot stand on its own, for the simple reason that rights have ultimately to be defended by force. In the circumstances of the 1970s, this required the United States to be militarily strong enough to resist and reverse the threat to world freedom posed by the Soviet Union. Yet President Carter had a passionate commitment to disarmament, demonstrated both by his early cancellation of the B1 strategic bomber and the renewed impetus he gave to SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which President Ford had initiated with the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, President Carter found that he could only take action to improve human rights against countries linked to the West, not against countries that were hostile and strong enough to ignore him.
As for the SALT II negotiations, it was possible to argue about the particular formulae, but the really important strategic fact was that the Soviet Union had in recent years been arming far faster than the Americans. Any mere ‘arms limitation’ agreement was bound to stabilize the military balance in such a way as to recognize this. Only deep arms cuts on the one hand, or a renewed drive for stronger American defences on the other, could reverse it. If, however, neither of these was a real possibility in the prevailing state of public opinion, then something on the broad lines of a SALT agreement was to the West’s advantage, since it would at least halt the Soviets’ advance. Either way, the United States had already lost its nuclear superiority at a time when the West had long since abandoned any attempt to keep up with the Warsaw Pact in conventional weapons. Crude as such calculations inevitably are, the scale of the change is shown by the following table:
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