Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  A September visit was planned in March 1977, but before this took place Mrs Thatcher met Carter for the first time during his visit to Britain in May. The courtesy call, at Winfield House, the American Ambassador’s residence in London, lasted for twenty minutes. Carter was accompanied by Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Advisor. Brzezinski’s assistant Robert Hunter, who was taking notes, recalled: ‘The most striking and memorable thing about this meeting was how vigorous and enthusiastic Mrs Thatcher was. Carter was very impressed by this. And she endeared herself to Brzezinski at the very beginning: “Oh yes, Dr Brzezinski,” she purred, “I spent all afternoon reading your books.” This left Zbig immensely pleased.’4 Brzezinski’s contemporary diary confirms these recollections: ‘P[resident] met with Thatcher in the evening. She impressed me as a shrewd and forceful politician. She amused me by mentioning a number of times that she had read several of my books … Perhaps she would have done better to have read Carter’s book. She didn’t mention this at all(!)’ Then Brzezinski sounded one note of anxiety: ‘The views on Africa expressed by Thatcher … were not quite what we would have liked. She did not come right out and say it, but I formed the distinct impression that she was inclined to support the white position.’5 For her part, Mrs Thatcher later remembered a successful meeting ‘in spite of my growing doubts about his foreign policy’.6 The New York Times reported: ‘Brimming with self-confidence, she told Mr Carter that her party would win the election no matter when it came, with the size of the majority the only matter in doubt.’7 It was this desire to convince people that she was the Prime Minister in waiting, more than any policy issue, which shaped Mrs Thatcher’s second US trip as leader. ‘I’m the next government,’ she told a group of American journalists. ‘I think I should meet your Cabinet.’8

  As the visit approached, certain obstacles presented themselves. Mrs Thatcher found the cursory briefing produced for her by the Foreign Office inadequate. ‘She thinks it’s terrible,’ Caroline Stephens told Rob Shepherd of the Conservative Research Department, who was tasked with rewriting the document to Mrs Thatcher’s more exacting standards.9 More worryingly, the White House was trying to impose a rule upon itself that the President would not normally meet leaders of foreign opposition parties. The administration had already rejected just such a request from François Mitterrand, the leader of the French Socialists (and future President of France). In a memo for Carter, Brzezinski suggested that in light of this precedent ‘and at the risk of offending Mrs. Thatcher, it seems to me that the principle should be established that opposition leaders meet with the Vice President, not you.’ He advised Carter to ‘plead a heavy schedule’ and pass Mrs Thatcher off to the Vice-President.10 Carter’s aides may also have had ideological objections to Mrs Thatcher* and they certainly did not want to upset Callaghan, to whom they were close. Faced with these concerns, Carter dithered. ‘Leave possibility open,’ he wrote on Brzezinski’s memo. ‘Tell them either VP or I will see them.’11 A good deal of bureaucratic toing and froing followed. In the end, according to a White House aide, ‘It was due to the general closeness of the UK/US relationship that we agreed to see her. Peter Jay also intervened on her behalf and said, in effect, you ought to get to know this lady.’12 Mrs Thatcher actually benefited from the fact that Peter Jay, the new British Ambassador in Washington, was Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law, and therefore, since he was also not a professional diplomat but a journalist, a controversial appointment. Given his ‘unusual connections’ with the Labour government, Jay felt he should ‘lean over backwards’ to help Mrs Thatcher, so much so that David Owen,† the Foreign Secretary, felt he was going ‘a little too far’.13 She got her meeting with the President.

  Before the meeting, Mrs Thatcher flew first to New York City. Emphasizing her commitment to free enterprise, she travelled on the fledgling, cut-price Laker Airways rather than British Airways, which was then still in public ownership. In her main speech there, to the British American Chamber of Commerce, she took as her text President Theodore Roosevelt’s words that ‘In this life we get nothing save by effort’ and won applause from her audience for her attack on statist economic fallacies and her declaration that the Western world was now moving into a post-socialist era,14 but media interest in her was less than in 1975, and the speech was not extensively reported. At a dinner given by NBC, she nearly fainted because of a combination of heat, exhaustion and a lifelong tendency to low blood pressure. Caroline Stephens who was on the trip, discussed the problem with Adam Butler, her PPS, and recorded it at the time: ‘She retires and ACB [Butler] and I discuss these bouts which are really quite serious and we decide that she should really play the grande dame more and demand to sit down if she feels faint. But she is too polite and socially insecure.’15

  The next stop was Houston, Texas, because, Mrs Thatcher explained, ‘Houston helped Britain enormously with North Sea Oil – it is nice to say thank you to friends.’16 The English Speaking Union organized a dinner at the River Oaks Country Club, though organized is scarcely the right word. Caroline Stephens recorded:

  No hairdresser for MT (as ordered); no one to press her dress (as ordered) and just to crown it MT got locked in the bathroom. Since we only had 40 minutes in all before arriving at the River Oaks Country Club for dinner these setbacks did not amuse MT and she became distinctly irritated apart from being up-tight which she always is before a major speech … Chaos reigned for the remainder of the evening. There was no one to greet us … and 500 people all very overdressed mostly already sitting down at their tables drinking cocktails. We entered unannounced as nobody recognised MT! Eventually dinner started without any formal announcement – toast to the Queen – long pause – MT supposed to toast the President but no one had warned her. However, she made a brilliant speech and got a standing ovation.17

  Her speech was the sort of preaching to the converted at which Mrs Thatcher always excelled. She identified the ‘common heritage’ of British and American ideas and declared it under attack. ‘The Christian values, which rest on Hebrew and Hellenic foundations … family life, the innocence of children, public decency, respect for the law, pride in good work, patriotism, democracy’ would all be undermined without a properly functioning free economy. ‘Keynes … is reputed to have said: “In the long run, we are all dead.” But in the long run, our children and their children will live; let it be in freedom.’ She announced her wish for Britain, with its new oil, to become ‘the Texas of Europe’ earning the money which would enable it to meet its NATO commitments.18 Roy Fox, the Consul-General in Houston, was struck by the speech’s power: ‘It was a glorious banquet with the new rising star in total control of her listeners for some 45–50 minutes – with hardly a note in front of her. She manifestly gained in confidence … They loved her more and more as the minutes ticked away. Her message could have been a bible for the Republican Party.’19 A slightly more equivocal form of compliment was given her by the man who introduced her at the dinner, one George H. W. Bush,* billed by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the former head of the CIA’. He said Mrs Thatcher was ‘a bright lady … frighteningly bright’.20 The impression he took away was of ‘a woman with a very forceful personality’.21 The future President’s nervous praise foreshadowed some of their later interactions.

  Mrs Thatcher then flew to Washington, and into an atmosphere of unease. She was met at the airport by Peter Jay and the television cameras, and taken to the Embassy, where she was staying. Caroline Stephens recorded: ‘I got an explosion from MT while I was helping her to change; “This visit is going to be worse than I feared – P.J. doing everything for his own self-aggrandissment [sic]; cameras at the airport were for him not for me; pointless briefing; they told me nothing new; I have better contacts than they do; they are all socialist and hostile” (rather unjustified I thought as Lord Bridges [the relevant Foreign Office official] had given her an energy brief).’22 These slights were more imagined than real, and in fact by the end of
her stay she had become very appreciative of the efforts which the Jays made for her; but there was a grain of truth in her fears. ‘There is no doubt about it but that the FO is hostile to MT,’ Stephens wrote in her diary, ‘– there is an obvious reason for this in that almost all the ones I know vote Socialist.’23

  As for the serious politics of her Washington visit, it was Rhodesia which gave her the greatest trouble. At the beginning of the month, David Owen and Andrew Young, Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, had put forward a plan for transition from Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia to majority rule (the government was illegal because it had unilaterally declared Rhodesia’s independence from Britain in 1965). But the pitch for this plan had been queered by Carter’s earlier announcement, at the beginning of August, that he had unilaterally agreed with President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania that the existing (largely white) Rhodesian security forces would need to be disbanded and the army of the new nation would be ‘based on the liberation armies’ that were fighting the guerrilla war against Smith. This threat strengthened Smith’s position with his white tribe at home (he won every seat in Parliament in the elections of 31 August 1977) and upset the British. Mrs Thatcher told Time magazine that the disbanding of the Rhodesian security forces ‘could introduce a destabilising factor’,24 and was ready to say the same to Carter in person. The Shadow Foreign Secretary John Davies, who accompanied her in Washington, did not share her robust views and they had a lengthy row over the issue before seeing Carter. Mrs Thatcher did not relent. ‘Why did I ever ask him [Davies] to join me,’ she later fumed to Caroline Stephens, ‘he can’t possibly take that view on Rhodesia; if he carries on like that I shall have to tell him to shut up etc.’25 Meeting Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, the day before she saw Carter, Mrs Thatcher made her views clear. ‘She is strongly opposed to including any black “terrorists” in the Rhodesian Army – which she likened to the British Army accepting elements of the Irish Republican Army,’ Vance reported to the President. ‘I hope they are not giving support to Smith,’ Carter wrote in the margin.26 In his briefing for Carter before the meeting in the Oval Office, Vance struck a pessimistic note: ‘We will be lucky if her US visit passes without further public acknowledgement on her part of strong opposition to key elements of the UK–US plan.’27

  The meeting, though certainly friendly, was not wholly easy. Gregory Treverton of the National Security Council (NSC), who was present, remembered:

  Mrs Thatcher spoke very nicely but very aggressively when addressing President Carter. It soon appeared that she had launched into a campaign speech, rather as if she were addressing the Rotary Club. Carter was such a sweet man that he didn’t seem to mind and just sat there listening. Walter Mondale [the Vice-President] however started to squirm. Finally Carter got a word in edgeways. Assuming she would be well versed in international issues he asked her: ‘What would your view be on a CTB?’ There was silence. You could see Mrs Thatcher frantically rifling through her mental card file but to no avail. Eventually John Davies tactfully prompted her, reminding her that Carter was talking about the Comprehensive Test Ban.28

  Mondale himself recalled:

  Margaret Thatcher was very clear and instructive [that is, giving instructions] on how the US approach was all wrong. Rhodesia, she insisted, needed to be given a chance to work itself out. Carter didn’t say anything, but I knew him well. There was a blood vessel in his neck that used to throb when he got irritated. And when Margaret Thatcher got onto the subject of Rhodesia it started to throb with a vengeance. It wasn’t the fact that she disagreed with him, but it was the way she did it. She was imperious.29

  A similar impression was collected by the Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, who, at a separate meeting with Mrs Thatcher, got something close to a dressing-down on the Carter administration’s soft attitude to arms control: ‘A mutual friend had told me, “She’s not the sort of person you would find very agreeable on a one-to-one dinner date,” and I swiftly reached the same conclusion.’30

  At the press conference after the meeting, Mrs Thatcher naturally avoided any impression of disagreement with Carter, although she did stress her anxiety about the disbanding of the Rhodesian security forces, but there was a slightly uncomfortable overall impression about her relations with the new administration. Friendly Americans felt it too. Henry Kissinger recalled that ‘She came to Washington and foolishly the Carter people did not receive her so I gave dinner for her every night she was in Washington … it seemed to me she felt snubbed by the Carter administration but she did not show her frustration.’31 In fact, Dr Kissinger’s memory was mistaken – he gave only one dinner for Mrs Thatcher – but he was not wrong in remembering a rather frosty atmosphere at the White House. Mrs Thatcher consoled herself by meeting Jesse Helms and with what Caroline Stephens called ‘private and disturbingly rightwing meetings’,32 including one with Major General George Keegan Jr who had recently retired as chief of USAF intelligence. Keegan had argued, after his retirement, that the Soviet Union had overtaken the US in military power and could now survive a nuclear war in its network of underground shelters, and win it.33 Ronald Reagan had used Keegan’s pronouncements in his own public utterances, and Mrs Thatcher was fascinated by his gloomy warnings.

  A combination of this unspoken tension with Carter’s people and the intrusion of party rows about the closed shop back home (see Chapter 13) proved too much for Mrs Thatcher. Before flying home on 14 September 1977, she gave an informal but on-the-record briefing to the press in the drawing room of the Ambassador’s residence. It quickly went wrong. Peter Jay was witness:

  The journalists got on to the issue of the White House press spokesman on television as the voice of the administration. They regarded the US system as far superior to the British system, which was dominated by the lobby journalists [who have privileged access to the Houses of Parliament]. They raised this, thinking they would have a background chat, as Callaghan would have done. Mrs Thatcher took it differently. She considered it an attack on Britain. She got very angry. She gave a real hectoring speech – an O Level on the responsibilities of ministers and accountability to Parliament. This got worse and worse. And then suddenly, she stood up and walked out. I followed her as the dutiful host – we went all the way down the long marble corridors to the other end of the house and the library. And then I saw – she was in tears – tears of rage I think, partly. I had to give her several whiskies to restore equilibrium.34

  When Mrs Thatcher reached London, she wanted to hide. The Financial Times reported: ‘She was in no mood to receive the battery of reporters and photographers which met her at Heathrow Airport … A spokesman said: “Mrs Thatcher has absolutely nothing to say. She made a statement before leaving Washington, and I am afraid she has nothing to add.” ’35 Although the Guardian reported, following White House private briefing, that her attitude to Rhodesia had made the Carter administration ‘uneasy’,36 there had been no public breach and the courtesies had been perfectly well maintained. She had gone down well in New York, and a storm in Houston, but she knew that her Washington visit had not been politically successful, and that, in a world naturally hostile to opposition leaders, she was if anything more friendless than she had been two years earlier. As she returned to her party’s divisions about trade unions, she had reason to feel dispirited.

  Because it is easy and, in many ways, accurate to portray Mrs Thatcher as a conviction politician, other vital aspects of her style of leadership are too readily neglected. One was the skills of the performer, which Michael Portillo had already noticed. Another was the skills of the party manager. It was said at the time, and throughout her career, that Mrs Thatcher was a poor manager of her Shadow Cabinets and Cabinets. This is true in the sense that she often affronted the amour-propre of colleagues, and could be surprisingly disorderly in the transaction of business. But, particularly in the 1970s, she was a skilled manager of her wider party, both in Parliament and in the country, and adept
at preserving a working coalition of opinion at the top of the party. She knew she was on probation, and operating in a hung Parliament. She listened to the Chief Whip, Atkins, and to Willie Whitelaw, and was endlessly patient in attending to the party grass-roots and to backbenchers. Once she had worked out those issues – chiefly economic – which she regarded as the key to national recovery, she was usually happy to treat everything else with an eye more to party unity than to doctrinal purity.

  Rhodesia is a case in point. In March 1978, ignoring the 1977 initiative of the Callaghan and Carter administrations, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, reached an ‘internal settlement’ for a form of majority rule with significant elements of the black population, led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The agreement was immediately denounced by Robert Mugabe* and Joshua Nkomo, the main black leaders fighting the civil war, and by most of the ‘international community’. To many Conservatives, however, who had always been uncomfortable with what they saw as the persecution of ‘our kith and kin’ in Rhodesia, Smith’s ability to make a deal seemed laudable, and the party leadership came under pressure to support it. These sentiments, strongly backed by Denis, who knew the region well, were Mrs Thatcher’s own. Echoing Lord Randolph Churchill’s famous inflammatory comment about Ulster ninety years earlier, she told an ad hoc party policy meeting on the subject that if Marxist Mugabe were allowed to come to power, ‘The whites will fight, and the whites will be right.’37 An arrangement which kept whites in the country and united them with moderate blacks was really her ideal, and she was passionate in her dislike of the Soviet-backed Marxists who helped arm, train and inspire many of the guerrillas. She duly supported what had happened, but without committing herself to it in full. The fact that black and white in Rhodesia needed one another laid ‘the foundations of a lasting settlement’, she said.38 But when the pressure increased for the Conservatives to nail their colours to the Smith–Muzorewa mast, Mrs Thatcher became very cautious.