Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  It chanced that, by arrangement with the previous government, the first foreign leader scheduled for a visit to No. 10 was Helmut Schmidt, the Chancellor of West Germany.* This did not please Mrs Thatcher, though she knew about it and had provisionally accepted it before coming into office. ‘Why’s he coming?’ she complained to John Hunt. ‘I didn’t ask for it.’ But the visit, which took place only a week after her victory, was a success. Schmidt was staggered by Mrs Thatcher’s mastery of her brief.100 For her part, Mrs Thatcher never expressed, even in private, the anti-German feeling that would appear in later years.101 In public, she was admiring of German achievements, noting in her speech at the dinner that Germany’s ‘enviable example’ of economic success had been mentioned in both the main parties’ election manifestos. She then launched into a statement of Britain’s attitude to the EEC which, while warm – ‘Ours is not a grudging acquiescence in Community membership’ – was also realistic rather than visionary. She complained that Britain paid the ‘lion’s share’ of the bill for wasteful agricultural surpluses, and emphasized the ‘variety of our distinct nation states’. The strongest link between Germany and Britain, she said, was not the EEC but that ‘First and foremost, we are both members of the North Atlantic Alliance.’102 At the joint press conference the next day, Mrs Thatcher was asked, for the first of scores of occasions in her administration, when Britain would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS), which was something which Germany strongly urged. Also for the first of scores of occasions, she played for time. The government would look at the matter, she promised, when the system was reviewed in September.103

  Her remarks on EEC subjects at this time were conditioned by the fact that, eleven days after winning one election, she had to start fighting another. For the first time, direct elections were held for the European Parliament, or Assembly as it was still properly called and as Mrs Thatcher, wary of its pretensions, preferred to call it. The Conservative manifesto, launched on 15 May, declared a vague aim of joining the ERM at an unspecified point. Apart from launching the manifesto, Mrs Thatcher made only one campaign speech, to a ‘Youth for Europe’ rally on 2 June. Here she maintained the party’s pro-European orthodoxy, but expressed it in a way that fitted with her other preoccupations. The EEC, she argued, should promote freedom, both in economic terms and against Soviet tyranny: ‘the Treaty of Rome says little about the ideal of freedom, but defines at length the economic structures necessary to sustain it.’ European values would never be secure so long as there was a Berlin wall. And without beating an anti-Brussels drum, she signalled her strong dissatisfaction with the European budget: Britain’s contribution was ‘manifestly unjust’.104 In the poll on 7 June 1979, the Conservatives won sixty seats against the Labour Party’s seventeen.

  The first European journey – indeed the first journey abroad – of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership was to France, to meet President Giscard d’Estaing. In accordance with her desire to keep official parties to a minimum, only she, plus Carrington, two private secretaries and two detectives, arrived at Le Bourget in a tiny Hawker jet to be received by the vast panoply of the French state.105 Although the two leaders were politicians of the centre-right, the meeting with Giscard was not a success. At the luncheon he gave for her at the Elysée Palace, he was served first, because, in terms of protocol, a head of state takes precedence over a head of government. She had not been forewarned of the rule. ‘Her lips tightened as she noticed,’ Bryan Cartledge observed. ‘Giscard was insufferable towards her.’106 She later, in private conversation, described Giscard as ‘very [long, disdainful pause] noble’.107 Giscard, who had met Mrs Thatcher briefly once before, when she was in opposition, recalled their Elysée encounter thus: ‘When our children were young, my family, being rather snobbish, employed an English nanny. She was very correct, very tidy, with a very neat hairdo. She was efficient, religious, always opening the windows, especially when the children were ill; rather tiresome. When I met Mrs Thatcher, I thought “She is exactly the same, exactly the same!” ’ In his view, the rules of protocol were no sort of insult – ‘The President is in the line of Sovereigns’: he had not intended any slight.108

  Official records of their talks suggest that Mrs Thatcher expressed herself with slightly unwelcome trenchancy. Discussing the forthcoming economic summit in Tokyo, she said that ‘she had never attended an Economic Summit but she had studied their communiqués closely: they were always the same. Meanwhile, the world’s economic problems continued, and so did the communiqués.’ She also volunteered the first of many firm statements that the British government ‘could not possibly contemplate sanctions against South Africa’.109

  Because France held the six-month rotating presidency of the EEC at that time, the first EEC Council of Ministers attended by Mrs Thatcher was in Strasbourg. It was therefore Giscard who set the agenda and tone of the meeting and thus helped, because of his treatment of her in Paris, to prejudice her against it. The Council meeting, which took place on 21 and 22 June 1979, gave Mrs Thatcher her first formal chance to express her dissatisfaction with the British contribution to the European budget. Although only the seventh richest member state (per head of population) at that time, Britain paid, after Germany, the largest net contribution. This derived from the fact that Britain had higher levels of non-EEC trade than other member states, therefore attracting an EEC tariff, and an economy much less geared to agricultural subsidy than the Continental ones. The Common Agricultural Policy was designed to assist those economies which, after 1945, were emerging from peasant agriculture. For Britain, whose agriculture was much more modern, the cost was higher than the benefit. Mrs Thatcher sought to gain acceptance of the need for action from her partners, and to get proposals for long-lasting reform on to the agenda for the next summit, which was to be in Dublin in the autumn.

  The conduct of the Strasbourg summit was, in the words of Clive Whitmore, who had joined as her new principal private secretary the week before, ‘quite an eye-opener for her’.110 Although, in private conversation, Giscard had indicated to Mrs Thatcher over lunch that he would grant her request for a proper discussion of the budgetary problem on the first day, so that it could be included properly in the communiqué, he then played what she considered to be a trick. He devoted the afternoon to other subjects, proposing, late in the day, that the budgetary question be reserved for the dinner that night. This would have made it vaguer, because no officials would have been present, and would have kept it out of the communiqué. Mrs Thatcher said ‘no’. Giscard’s account is different: ‘I was irritated by her insistence that the budget problem be at the top of the agenda, because it was not a common topic: it was a British topic.’111

  ‘She always wanted to nail things down; Giscard always wanted to leave them to the fonctionnaires,’ recalled Bryan Cartledge. In this case, she was successful, to the extent that the communiqué mandated the European Commission to come up with proposals in time for the Dublin summit to solve the budget problem. But Mrs Thatcher was angry at the attempt to circumvent her, and was still so irritated that, as crowds gathered on the pavements to watch her go off to the dinner that night in the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce, she turned to Cartledge and asked: ‘Do I really have to go through with this?’112 Giscard, who had organized a special parade of the Garde Republicaine to greet the leaders before dinner at the Royal Palace, noted with amusement that Mrs Thatcher arrived last (which was very untypical of her and can only have been because of her reluctance to come at all) and was overdressed: ‘She was in an evening gown; we were in normal suits. But all the others were captivated. She was a good-looking English lady.’113 For her part, Mrs Thatcher immediately, and ever afterwards, disliked the process and style by which the EEC did its business. ‘She was hostile to the European Community from the beginning,’ Giscard considered.114

  A good deal of the talk at Strasbourg had taken place in the light of the forthcoming summit of the G7 to be held from 27 to 29 June
1979 in Tokyo. The biggest subjects to be discussed were inflation and the growing energy crisis, caused in part by the effects of the Islamist revolution in Iran earlier in the year, which had reduced the world supply of oil. These were matters of keen interest to Mrs Thatcher. In her uncomfortable meeting with Giscard on 5 June, she had indicated the special difficulties which the British context raised:

  The Prime Minister said that the British Government was at present pursuing a policy of requiring power stations in the UK to substitute coal for oil: if continued, however, this policy could affect the UK’s capacity to build up coal stocks, which would be needed against the possibility of further trouble from the miners during the coming winter. The Government might, therefore, have to reconsider.115

  Coal might help because of the oil shortage, but, from a domestic political point of view, it was the most dangerous fuel for a Conservative government to rely on. It is not surprising that Mrs Thatcher looked more favourably on nuclear energy. She was also conscious that she was governing a country, which, unlike all its G7 partners, was moving fast, because of the North Sea, to being a net oil exporter.

  Mrs Thatcher approached Tokyo with the native suspicion she brought to summitry. She told Bryan Cartledge, who accompanied her, to count the size of the respective national delegations, in the hope that Britain’s would be the smallest, and was annoyed to discover that the Canadian was smaller still. She was particularly impatient of the Japanese fondness for platitudinous communiqués, and was very keen that the summit focus on energy problems and oppose any attempt to reflate the world economy.116 For their part, the Japanese, to whom the idea of a woman prime minister was quite fascinatingly alien, devised a special security plan. Every other national leader at the summit was assigned twenty male karate experts to protect them. The Japanese proposed twenty ‘karate ladies’ to guard Mrs Thatcher. The Cabinet Secretary had to intervene. The Foreign Office reported that John Hunt had told the Japanese that ‘Mrs Thatcher will attend the Summit as Prime Minister and not as a woman per se and he was sure she would not want these ladies.’ If it were the form for other leaders, the Prime Minister would have ‘no objection’ to being attended by twenty ‘karate gentlemen’.117

  At the last-minute invitation of the Kremlin, Mrs Thatcher broke her flight to Tokyo at Moscow airport, where she was given an impromptu supper by the Soviets. The decision to fly through Soviet air space reduced the journey time by two and a half hours and had been taken on purely logistical grounds. However, the Soviet Prime Minister, Alexei Kosygin, decided, late in the day, to host the occasion personally. By her own account, she gave Kosygin a talking-to about the plight of the Vietnamese Boat People – victims, she told him, of Communism.118 ‘It was very plain speaking from a prime minister, not wrapped up at all in diplomatic nicety,’ recalled Whitmore, who was present, ‘but to be fair, Kosygin was not knocked sideways but gave as good as he got.’119 Mrs Thatcher had never encountered the Soviet leadership before, and they were very curious about the Iron Lady. ‘Neither thought the other was as bad as each had expected,’ noted Bryan Cartledge.120 Although Mrs Thatcher felt no affection for her Soviet interlocutor, and vice versa, both leaders rather enjoyed their verbal joust.*

  Despite her aversion to summitry, Mrs Thatcher was pleased with Tokyo, partly because she was the centre of vast media attention. ‘She relished being the new girl,’ said Cartledge.121 It also offered her first big chance to try out her skills at these occasions. Although she was often the despair of officials because of her disdain for diplomatic niceties, in another way Mrs Thatcher was an excellent negotiator, because she was so well informed and so eager to get business properly transacted. Negotiation, said Cartledge, ‘came entirely naturally to her. She read her briefs and she took them seriously.’ Before a major meeting, she would conduct an inquisition of officials, asking them sharp questions that her legal training prompted. She had no self-doubt, but neither was she overconfident: ‘If she didn’t understand something, she just asked.’122 She was also unafraid of cutting through the summit hierarchy if her purposes demanded it. Unlike other leaders, she would visit the ‘sherpas’ (the summit officials) and harangue them directly on points of detail. ‘It was excellent, really smart lobbying,’ recalled Bob Hormats, the US sherpa. ‘I remember saying to Carter, “Well, if you want to get some of your stuff in, maybe you should come around …” He said, “Oh, I’ll let Margaret do that.” ’123 In her opening statement at the Tokyo conference Mrs Thatcher spoke succinctly and without notes. Declaring that ‘pious platitudes’ should be avoided, she painted a gloomy picture of a world economy declining month by month because of the oil price. She nevertheless pleaded with colleagues to ‘let the price mechanism work in full’ and also argued the need for more nuclear energy. One reason she advanced in favour of nuclear energy was an ecological one. People who were concerned about the environment, she said in a pre-summit interview, ‘should also be worried about the effect of constantly burning more coal and oil because that can create a band of carbon dioxide round the earth which could itself have very damaging ecological effects’.124 She also warned the G7 that the fight against inflation would mean that a decline in real income was ‘unavoidable in the short term’.125 She stuck to her opposition to reflation. While the Seven were gathered in Tokyo, the price of Saudi oil rose from $14.54 to $18 a barrel. Their collective impotence was emphasized.

  In the margins of Tokyo, Mrs Thatcher met Jimmy Carter, for the first time as prime minister. Her election had led to a shift in the way she was perceived in the White House. ‘King Brewster [Kingman Brewster, US Ambassador to Britain] believes the new PM to be a cooler, wiser, more pragmatic person now than the Opposition Leader you met in May, 1977 or the dogmatic lady who visited you in Washington that fall,’ Zbigniew Brzezinski minuted Carter in May 1979. ‘I agree,’ Carter wrote in the margin. But despite her ‘tempering’, Brzezinski continued, ‘I think it will take patience to deal with Mrs Thatcher’s hard-driving nature and her tendency to hector.’126 Although each saw something to admire in the seriousness of the other, the relationship was not warm. Carter recorded in his diary that she was ‘highly opinionated, strong-willed, cannot admit that she doesn’t know something’. He added, limply: ‘However, I think she will be a good prime minister for Great Britain.’127* She regarded Carter’s analysis, both economic and political, of the state of the world as ‘badly flawed’.128 Giscard d’Estaing, though not at ease with Mrs Thatcher, noted the difference between the two, in her favour: ‘She knew what she wanted to do, and she tried to do it. Jimmy Carter didn’t.’129 The most pressing and most immediately difficult issue that the two had to discuss was Rhodesia.

  Under the internal settlement devised by the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, multi-racial elections, albeit ones that entrenched disproportionate white power in Parliament, the police and the armed services, had taken place in April 1979. Rejecting the provisions favouring the white minority, the popular black radical parties, including Robert Mugabe’s Patriotic Front, had boycotted the election. Consequently, on a 64 per cent turn-out, the voters had returned a government led by Bishop Muzorewa, the more accommodating black candidate favoured by Smith. Mrs Thatcher, who remained sympathetic towards the white minority, had taken the Conservatives into the general election saying that she would await the result of a report into the elections which she had commissioned from Lord Boyd, the former Colonial Secretary. The strong implication of her stance was that, if Boyd pronounced the election fair, she would recognize the legitimacy of the new government.* Such a policy went strongly against that of Jimmy Carter and of the previous British government, in which David Owen had been foreign secretary. Their approach, in line with much of world opinion, had been to reject the internal settlement because of the privileged position it entrenched for the white minority. They intended to keep Rhodesia isolated on the world stage until a more inclusive constitutional settlement, with participation from Mugabe’s Patriotic Front and other black
radical parties, was adopted. Driven by the power of the black caucus in Democratic politics, and by its own ideological beliefs, the Carter administration had been fearful of Mrs Thatcher’s approach before she assumed office. According to Raymond Seitz,† who worked at the US Embassy in London at that time: ‘If Mrs Thatcher was the victor, then the Anglo-American relationship was in for a rocky time. She made it pretty clear during the campaign that she would recognise the Muzorewa government if she won. And we made it just as clear that we wouldn’t. And that more or less public disagreement hung over the election and of course excited the press even more.’130 Even Lord Carrington, who was not sympathetic to the internal settlement, felt that the Carter administration were making life more difficult for themselves: ‘They were rather against her. They were pretty unpleasant … they thought she was a sort of right-wing baboon, even after she had been elected. It was her reputation. They were pressing rather hard not to recognize Muzorewa, and I think that was rather counterproductive.’131

  Lord Boyd’s report, whose substance she knew by 14 May, declared that the elections in Rhodesia had been, allowing for the difficult conditions of civil war, as free and fair as possible. ‘There was an election,’ she told Time magazine, even before Boyd reported, ‘one person, one vote for four different parties. Where else would you get that in Africa?’132 ‘The main question-mark at the moment’, Brzezinski warned Carter shortly after her election victory, ‘remains the extent to which Mrs. Thatcher may be serious in her expressed intention to recognize the Muzorewa government.’133 Recognizing Muzorewa would, at a stroke, end Rhodesia’s international isolation and rubberstamp Smith’s internal settlement. Carter’s people held their breath. ‘I thought probably that the game was up,’ said one.134 Yet Mrs Thatcher held back. In her first political speech in Parliament as prime minister, in the debate on the Queen’s Speech on 15 May, she spoke of the developments within Rhodesia as good, but added that she wanted ‘a return to legality in conditions that secure wide international recognition’.135 It was this which was not forthcoming.