Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  So when the Soviet leaders jail a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker, for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a regime that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedom we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.

  She held up the recently exiled Soviet novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn* as the model of truth-telling against Communist lies. Her test of whether peace was really coming closer was whether there was any advance in ‘the free movement of people and of ideas’.

  In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher makes it a point almost of pride that she did not consult or inform Reggie Maudling, whom she had just appointed shadow foreign secretary, about what she was going to say in Chelsea. ‘… I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings,’ she writes sharply, and with a revealing lack of confidence in her own choice of spokesman, ‘which would doubtless be leaked afterwards – particularly if things went wrong.’51 But she may well have been emboldened against possible establishment criticism by the help she received (but does not mention in her memoirs) from Lord Home. Of all the Tory leaders between Churchill and Mrs Thatcher, Home was the most robust in his dislike of Soviet Communism. Before speaking at Chelsea, Mrs Thatcher had meetings with him on the subject, and invited his comments on the draft. After making the speech, she wrote to thank him ‘first for providing the framework for the foreign affairs speech and then for going through it so carefully’.52 Home wrote back to her that she had been ‘absolutely right’ to make the speech.53 Chelsea was the first time in her career that Margaret Thatcher made a major public statement about the state of the world. It set a standard of clarity and controversy which she was to maintain.

  It was natural that one of Mrs Thatcher’s earliest decisions was to visit the United States. Her first foreign visit, out of deference to the recent EEC referendum, had been to West Germany (see above), where she had met and been impressed by the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt,* and also met the Christian Democrat leader Helmut Kohl.† She decided at once that Kohl was ‘the German equivalent of Ted Heath’,54 a view which was to have important and malign consequences.‡ But the visit to Bonn had not been intended as a big show. America was. There was a conscious desire, by putting her on the world stage in the United States, to establish her as somebody of substance in time for what promised to be a difficult first party conference as leader in early October. This was linked with her ideological interest in the language of freedom and liberty which she found very attractive in American politics and which she believed the English-speaking peoples shared. She wanted to relaunch such language into British political debate, and saw her American trip as providing the time and place to do so.55 She also wanted to repair Conservative relations with American politicians, which had fallen on hard times during Ted Heath’s time as leader. This froideur was partly attributable to Heath’s single-minded devotion to Britain’s entry into the EEC, which was seen by some Americans as unfriendly, and partly to his personal anti-Americanism, the strongest of any Tory leader in modern times.* Her own feelings were the opposite.

  On 18 February 1975, shortly before announcing her Shadow Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher had breakfast with the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger,† at Claridge’s. The two had met once before, when Mrs Thatcher was education secretary, a meeting which Ted Heath had discouraged,56 and had got on well. The breakfast was also a success. Mrs Thatcher wrote to William Galloway, the US Embassy official who had arranged her 1967 US trip, to say that she had ‘become one of his [Kissinger’s] many fans’57 and that she hoped to visit America soon. Kissinger remembered: ‘I found her totally different from other politicians. Every other politician I knew said that in order to win elections you had to win the centre. Her position was that you have to articulate your position as clearly as you can and the centre will come over to you … I was always very taken with her. You could say she seduced me … But I thought she might never get elected with those views.’58 That doubt is visible in the contemporary record. In a discussion about which European leaders President Gerald Ford should meet, Kissinger advised him: ‘… Soames may be a big Conservative leader sometime. I don’t think Margaret Thatcher will last.’59

  On 9 April 1975, Mrs Thatcher sat down with a visiting American dignitary in her office in the Commons. His name was Ronald Reagan.‡ Although this was their first tête-à-tête, Reagan had initially come to her attention some years earlier. Back in 1969, Denis had attended a meeting at the Institute of Directors in London addressed by Reagan, then Governor of California, and had come home full of praise for him.60 Three years later, on 17 July 1972, Mrs Thatcher attended a group luncheon at No. 10 in Reagan’s honour, although there is no evidence that she and Reagan spoke. By early 1975, Reagan’s second term as governor had expired and he was positioning himself to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976.* His visit to the UK, which included meetings with the Labour government and a setpiece speech to the Pilgrims Society, was designed to bolster his foreign policy credentials. The suggestion that Reagan also meet Mrs Thatcher came from a member of his kitchen cabinet, Justin Dart, whose Tupperware company had a strong presence in the UK. ‘Ronnie, you’ve got to meet her,’ Dart told Reagan, ‘she’s terrific.’61 Reagan’s meeting with Mrs Thatcher, planned for forty-five minutes, went on for an hour and a half. ‘I was immediately won over by his charm, directness and sense of humour,’ Mrs Thatcher later wrote.62 Reagan recalled: ‘It was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding freedom.’63 Reagan drew on his experiences in London in crafting one of the radio addresses that he delivered weekly during this period. ‘This is the time of year when winter isn’t quite ready to loosen its grip on London,’ Reagan told his listeners, ‘but still the daffodils are up over Hyde Park and even a few rays of sunshine are enough on a Sunday afternoon to bring out throngs of strollers …’ Reagan went on to outline the debate in Britain over joining the EEC, highlighting the splits in the Labour Party:

  Failure by Labor to heal the breach in its ranks might lead to elections as early as this fall, some say. If so, Britain may get its first woman Prime Minister in its more-than-900-year history. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, the new leader of the Conservative Party, is a woman of charm and poise and also strength. The British like their politicians to stand for something and she does. In a recent nationwide poll she was named as the country’s most popular political figure.64

  Reagan repeatedly sang Mrs Thatcher’s praises in conversations with aides after the meeting.65 ‘That evening, Reagan was still going on and on about this wonderful woman he’d met.’66 Writing to thank her, he invited Mrs Thatcher to visit him in California. She replied warmly, but said she would not have the time to reach the West Coast during her planned visit in September. They were not to see one another again or indeed speak until 1978, but their staffs stayed in touch. Reagan’s people would send over transcripts of his radio broadcasts and speeches, which would be filtered by Mrs Thatcher’s office, the more interesting offerings ending up in her weekend box. One could scarcely talk of a relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Reagan at this stage, but the seeds of future friendship had been sown.

  In mid-April Mrs Thatcher received a letter from the British Ambassador to the United States, Sir Peter Ramsbotham, who had heard that she was contemplating a visit, inviting her to stay with him at the residence in Washington. She also took advice from Sir Patrick Dean, one of Sir Peter’s predecessors in Washington. Despite her enthusiasm for the trip and for America, she had few channels of her own which she could open. She did not exactly know what to do or whom she wanted to meet or which media outlets she should seek. As a result, although there was a strong ideological element in what she planned to say, there was little in her itinerary or range of contacts. She aimed only to be received at the
highest levels. Her private office arranged her speaking engagements but asked the Foreign Office to put together the rest of her programme. She accepted most of the official suggestions, although she did reject the idea of a lunch at Brookings, the liberal-left think tank which, she suspected, represented the ‘consensus’ she disliked.67 She sounded out Ramsbotham to check that she would not cause offence in America if she arrived without her Shadow Foreign Secretary, Maudling: she did not want her personal impact diluted and was keen to travel without any rival attraction.

  As the plans for her visit developed, it became clear that the Foreign Office wanted Mrs Thatcher to give American audiences an upbeat account of the state of Britain. The American media were full of stories about British decline. An article in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Goodbye Britain, it was nice knowing you’ attracted much notice and was quoted by Mrs Thatcher that summer. ‘It is to Britain that journalists now come,’ she read out from the piece to Scottish Conservatives on 13 May, ‘following the scent of economic and political decay.’ Private discussion was equally gloomy. In a conversation with President Gerald Ford in January, Henry Kissinger told him that ‘Britain is a tragedy – it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in …’68 And Britain’s economic plight had become a cautionary tale for Americans. In April, Alan Greenspan, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, at that time the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, noted to Ford: ‘Observe that the British economy appears to be at the point where they must accelerate the amount of governmental fiscal stimulus just to stand still. This is clearly a very dangerous situation. The frightening parallels, with a lag, between the financial policies of the US and those of the UK should give us considerable pause.’69* A Foreign Office official wrote to Derek Howe, her press secretary: ‘Mrs Thatcher’s audiences will want to hear her affirm strongly that Britain is going to come through its current difficulties. The North American press has overdone the gloom. Mrs Thatcher will no doubt wish to underline the positive side of the picture (relatively low level of unemployment, improved balance of payments, firm action to grasp the nettle of inflation etc).’70 Beside these suggestions, Mrs Thatcher wrote two large question marks. She certainly wanted to tell a good story about the potential of her country, but she had no desire to talk up the achievements of the Labour government.

  Mrs Thatcher arrived in New York on 13 September 1975, and on the 15th delivered her first full speech, under the title ‘Let Our Children Grow Tall’. This was a fierce and full expression of her belief that ‘The pursuit of equality is itself a mirage.’ Those who wanted yet more equality, she said, had an ‘undistinguished combination of envy and what might be called “bourgeois guilt” ’. It was essential to create wealth before giving so much attention to its distribution. In Britain in 1975, some 56 per cent of Gross Domestic Product was ‘controlled and spent by the State’. In 1963, the man on average industrial earnings paid 5 per cent of them in tax; now he paid 25 per cent. There was a cycle of low profits, extra wages, more government spending, more taxes, and controls leading to loss of profits which meant that people no longer wanted to invest in equities. ‘Let our children grow tall,’ she declared, ‘and some taller than others if they have the ability to do so.’ ‘You’ll be the next PM,’ shouted out one of the guests, to general applause.

  Back in Britain, the speech nearly turned to disaster because Conservative Central Office – with, Gordon Reece believed, unfriendly intent – released an early draft which appeared to suggest that government spending on kidney machines should be limited. Central Office refused to withdraw what it had circulated, so it was left to Reece, who was with Mrs Thatcher in New York, to ring round Fleet Street, calling in his well-established friendships. ‘The truth is’, he told them, ‘she’s not going to say it.’ His intervention was just in time: Larry Lamb, the editor of the Sun, told him that he had prepared a front-page headline ‘LET ’EM DIE, SAYS MAGGIE’.71 Even without the kidney machines, her words caused controversy at home. Her attack on British socialism was interpreted by some as a violation of what Michael Brunson, reporting for ITN, called the ‘so-called unwritten rule that visiting British politicians here don’t discuss internal party politics’.72 The Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, criticized her for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into her speech. Ministers complained privately to the Foreign Office about what she had said, and a British Embassy official, Hamilton Whyte, who was close to Labour, briefed against her unattributably in Washington.73 Mrs Thatcher was unrepentant, however: ‘It’s no part of my job’, she told The Times, ‘to be a propagandist for a socialist society.’74 The speech’s explicit support for inequality was extremely bold. She was careful to contrast her attacks on the poor state of her country with praise for its innate capacities. She told Barbara Walters on the Today Show, ‘we are the same people that we always were. We have the same sense of adventure. We are inventive … We are an eleventh-hour nation. We tend to wait until the last minute until we act. Well, we are at the eleventh hour now and action is being taken.’75 Overall, the general impression Mrs Thatcher created in New York was highly favourable, one of pleasant surprise. ‘The most operative word is lady,’ the New York Times quoted one luncheon guest as saying. ‘Here is this little blonde, blue-eyed woman in this pale peach dress with baby blonde hair. She is a flower among thorns. But it’s no little girl act either. She is just plain well-informed and extremely articulate.’76

  Mrs Thatcher was much happier when the focus of attention was her views rather than her sex. When she arrived for the interview with Barbara Walters, Walters warned her beforehand that she ‘might have to ask some questions about how it felt to be a woman in such a high post, much as she disliked that kind of question’. Mrs Thatcher shook her head. ‘Isn’t it too bad that there aren’t more women around who feel as we do,’ she said.77

  On 17 September, Mrs Thatcher flew to Washington. Within twenty-four hours of arriving, she met Kissinger, the Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, the Treasury Secretary Bill Simon and President Ford, as well as members of both Houses of Congress. As far as the US administration was concerned, there was not much of an agenda to these meetings. Mrs Thatcher was largely unknown in Washington, but her surprise victory in the leadership election had made its own impression. ‘Becoming leader of a party that has its fair share of male chauvinists was a remarkable achievement for Mrs. Thatcher, who has displayed courage, deftness and determination,’ noted her internal State Department biography.78 While Kissinger’s briefing for the President was largely favourable to Mrs Thatcher personally, it also pointed out that she was not yet master in her own house. The Secretary of State gave a crisp summary of her main political problem at home:

  Themselves divided on inflation policy between the advocates of statutory wage controls and ‘strict monetarists’, the Tories clearly are waiting to see if Labor can make a voluntary incomes policy stick with the unions – where the Conservatives failed with a statutory policy … The crucial test of individual unions’ compliance with the wage increase ceiling will come later this winter when the next rounds of wage bargaining get underway in earnest. Mrs Thatcher has tried to occupy a middle ground, resulting in a lack of clear public understanding of what exactly Tory policy is on this vital issue.79

  Mrs Thatcher’s unorthodox views on détente did not appear in Kissinger’s briefing, largely because the Americans had yet to recognize how deeply held these views were. The US Embassy in London, for example, chose to characterize her provocative speech to the Chelsea Conservative Association in July as offering ‘little that is new on the topic of relations between the West and the Soviet Union’.80 Kissinger was acutely aware of Mrs Thatcher’s inexperience in foreign policy* and was thus disinclined to take the ideas she was beginning to expound seriously. She was known to be generally friendly to the United States and that, for the moment, was enough. On the other hand, the administration clearly did not treat the Thatcher
visit perfunctorily. She met all the important people she wanted to meet.

  Mrs Thatcher was also more concerned with ‘face-time’, friendly talks and the exchange of ideas than with any more definite discussions. Her meeting with President Ford on 18 September passed off successfully, but unremarkably. General Brent Scowcroft,† who was present at the meeting, remembered: ‘She was very warm, very friendly, very composed. I remember almost nothing about the meeting and my overall impression was “nice lady” … We felt she was nice, but we didn’t see her as a heavyweight who was going to change the course of anything.’81 Mrs Thatcher was similarly pleased, and similarly unexcited, by the conversation: ‘Ford did not register very highly. She was pleased to have met Ford, but more due to his position than the substance of their discussions,’82 recalled one of her entourage.

  Other encounters, however, were more rapturous. Vast numbers turned up for her meeting with the House International Relations Committee. According to the British official present: ‘The level of enthusiasm was extraordinarily high – partly due to her being a woman, but also she was already manifesting very strong convictions that appealed to American Congressmen.’83 On the same day, Mrs Thatcher called on James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary. His staff had not even informed him that she was party leader (they had billed her as a member of the Shadow Cabinet), and he expected a fifteen-minute meeting:

  To my great surprise, in came this striking woman singing the praises of what was then called the Schlesinger doctrine.* She didn’t know much about it, but she was very eager to learn. We talked about our strategic nuclear forces for perhaps an hour and a half … She was very interested in everything I had to say and shortly afterwards she went on the road in support of the ideas.84