Visiting London on 21 May, the American Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, told Lord Carrington that Carter did not think the elections had been free and fair, and that US sanctions against Rhodesia (which the Senate had voted to lift) would stay. The United States administration wanted an all-party conference, an amended constitution and fresh elections. Carrington asked the Americans not to go public with their specific demands, to give him room for manoeuvre; and manoeuvre he did, sending Lord Harlech, the former British Ambassador to Washington, off to tour the ‘front-line’ African states and get their views. He succeeded in deflecting Mrs Thatcher from acceding to the internal settlement: ‘The thing that really persuaded her was that no one was going to support her. No member of the Commonwealth. The Americans were against it and all the members of the EEC were against it. And there might have been sanctions against us. These were the things which persuaded her. Not love of black majority rule. Lord Harlech came back reporting all this. Which of course is why I sent him. She respected his conclusions.’136
Although she listened, however, Mrs Thatcher was not going to revert to the policy of the previous government either. She had to be convinced of a new course. Robin Renwick,* head of the Rhodesia department at the Foreign Office, devised a plan which he hoped would appeal to her: ‘I managed … to give her something really radical: we should seek to intervene directly ourselves in Rhodesia. This was point number one. Point number two was that instead of trying to reach agreement with Nkomo and Mugabe … we should build on the internal settlement … and try and turn [it] into something that was internationally respectable. Then we should offer everyone the chance to participate in elections that we would have to supervise … Since it wasn’t what she was expecting, she was impressed by it.’137 But Mrs Thatcher did not hurry to make up her mind. She knew that she had to have a position in time for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, in August, but until then she veered back and forth. Visiting Australia after the Tokyo summit, she made what Carrington remembered as a ‘ghastly speech’138 in which she pushed for international recognition of the new government in Salisbury.
On 12 July 1979, in London, Mrs Thatcher met Kurt Waldheim, the United Nations Secretary-General. She told Waldheim that ‘Rhodesia was closer to democracy than any other country in Africa,’ that Muzorewa was ‘a very wise man’, and that the Western world should support him. ‘Mrs Thatcher opined’, said the UN minutes, ‘that if the West were to follow a policy which preferred bullets to ballots, there was no hope … When Lord Carrington interjected that some changes like a reduction of the white presence in parliament and Government should be achieved, the Prime Minister said: “Poor Peter always has to pick up the pieces when I have made my statements.” ’139 This report vividly conveys Mrs Thatcher’s perennial hostility to dealing with anyone she considered a terrorist* and her habit of expressing herself with what, for diplomats, was almost unbearable directness. But it also contains a hint of another of her characteristics – a readiness to give in, protesting, to people who knew more than she about a particular subject. She worried that she was ‘being conned by aristos’,140 but she almost enjoyed the process. ‘The critics were quite right,’ remembered Carrington, ‘it was devious,’141 but it suited Mrs Thatcher to go along with a policy from which she kept a personal distance. ‘She wasn’t the only person who could say “There is no alternative,” ’ recalled Carrington – she accepted the argument of inevitability, but at the same time she gave herself a let-out. ‘If it had gone wrong, she would have ratted.’
On 25 July, Mrs Thatcher finally made a statement to the House of Commons which contained, in slightly wrapped-up language, what the Foreign Office wanted. She promised that Britain would take charge and make firm proposals for broadly acceptable constitutional arrangements for Rhodesian independence. The key sentences were: ‘We shall aim to make the proposals comparable to the basis on which we granted independence to other former British territories in Africa. They will be addressed to all the parties to the conflict.’142 In other words, the internal settlement, as it stood, would not be enough, and the Patriotic Front would, if possible, be part of any agreement.
Then it was on to Lusaka, arriving on 30 July. Although it was not true, as Lord Carrington believed, that she had never been to sub-Saharan Africa before (she had visited South Africa when Education Secretary), Mrs Thatcher certainly knew little about the place. Cartledge believed that she had ‘no strong personal views’ on the issue of Rhodesia, but her general approach was strongly coloured by those of Denis, who had kin in South Africa and had travelled widely in the continent on business. He had an unreconstructed belief in the political and economic incompetence of black regimes, and a natural sympathy, based on ethnicity and sport, for the whites of southern Africa. One US official was present at a small dinner at the Ambassador’s residence during Mrs Thatcher’s period as leader of the Opposition: ‘The Thatchers wanted to watch a BBC programme on South Africa, so we adjourned upstairs. The programme began, and I realized for the first time, from the conversation between Margaret and Denis, that she had no use at all for blacks.’143 This is not a fair characterization of Mrs Thatcher’s attitudes – she usually avoided racial generalizations, except about the Germans and (more jocular) the Irish and the French – but it does indicate something of the atmosphere at home. She was also ‘physically frightened’144 of what would happen to her in Lusaka. Carrington recorded that she carried dark glasses on the aeroplane there. He asked her why: ‘Margaret answered very clearly, “I am absolutely certain that when I land at Lusaka they are going to throw acid in my face.” There had been some reported hysterical outburst, using that sort of violent language. I laughed. “You totally misunderstand Africans! … They’re more likely to cheer you.” Margaret stared at me, “I don’t believe you.” ’145 It was on that flight that Cartledge particularly noticed, with pleasure and some surprise, how well Mrs Thatcher got on with Carrington. The Foreign Secretary had successfully developed the ability to tease her. He could ‘make her throw her head right back with laughter’.146 Since virtually everyone else was too terrified of Mrs Thatcher to attempt such a thing, Carrington gained a particular standing in her eyes, and a particular freedom to do what he wanted. Denis, who certainly did not agree with Carrington about Rhodesia, was nevertheless a keen admirer, always referring to him as ‘a mighty man’.147*
As well as her anxiety about her reception in Zambia, Mrs Thatcher was worried by something else – the presence of the Queen, in her capacity as the head of the Commonwealth. The Queen’s duty towards and affection for the Commonwealth meant, at least in principle, that she might find herself at odds with her own, British government. Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the monarch was one compounded of constitutional correctness, old-fashioned deference and a certain unease, probably related to the fact that both were women, and neither had much experience of working with women at a high level.† Mrs Thatcher was ‘nervous about how to comport herself with the Queen’ and worried by a series of occasions in which she would either upstage the Queen by mistake or be overshadowed by her. There was a problem, though Mrs Thatcher would never have put it like this, of ‘Who’s the star?’ Besides, ‘The two’, Clive Whitmore noted, ‘were not exactly natural social partners.’148 Caroline Stephens, who knew Mrs Thatcher as well as anyone at this time, used to remind new private secretaries, ‘The first thing you have got to bear in mind is that Mrs Thatcher is a very ordinary woman.’ It was a strange thing to say about someone so clearly extraordinary, but it was also true. Mrs Thatcher was anxious about meeting the Queen in the way that most ordinary citizens would be, worrying about what to wear, when to curtsey and how to avoid being late.‡ She needed frequent reassurance.
In fact, the problem of proximity was overcome by the fact that the Queen left Lusaka after two days, the opening formalities having been completed. And her initial presence actually made life easier for Mrs Thatcher since the respect
felt for the Queen by the Commonwealth leaders rubbed off on her. Once her individual meetings with African leaders began, matters improved sharply. Cartledge had discovered that the Zambian President, Kenneth Kaunda, was, like Mrs Thatcher, the parent of twins. It is auspicious, in African culture, to have twins. This helped. Mrs Thatcher was charmed by Kaunda, and also had a successful meeting with Julius Nyerere, the left-wing President of Tanzania. She told the conference, in closed session, that the white blocking mechanism in the new constitution was not acceptable, and that the rules about some armed service appointments (which favoured whites) were also wrong, but she insisted as well that Rhodesia was a problem which it was Britain’s responsibility to sort out through a constitutional conference. The Commonwealth gave its support. ‘When she went to Lusaka,’ Robin Renwick remembered, ‘they were all expecting her to say, “Let’s recognize Muzorewa,” but she came up with a “Britain will take over” plan, which she loved, because it threw them all completely off balance.’149 On the morning of Sunday 5 August, after agreement had been reached, Mrs Thatcher, despite suffering from a severe stomach upset, ‘embarked on a perfectly dreadful evening presenting the Zambian press awards … I thought she was going to faint at one moment, particularly as she had had nothing to eat for 24 hours, but she got through it OK and even started the dancing with Kaunda.’150 Carrington was delighted by Mrs Thatcher’s achievements: ‘She did terribly well at Lusaka. She really was brilliant. She had never been to Africa [not true: see above] and I think she thought they were a lot of savages. When they turned up and Kaunda was a smooth old guy and they were all very agreeable, I think she thawed a bit.’151
Mrs Thatcher had a clear understanding of the nature of her success at Lusaka. Sir Anthony Parsons, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, congratulated her afterwards: ‘I said to her, “Prime Minister, I don’t want to sound like a sycophant, but you did very, very well in Lusaka.” And she laughed and said, “Well, Tony you know how it is, you people convinced me, but when it came to doing it in public, I think I did it a great deal better than you could have done.” ’152 A conference was called at Lancaster House in London for September. Although it included Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, whom she regarded as terrorists, Mrs Thatcher had achieved, in terms of diplomacy and reputation, an undoubted success. Worried about possible attacks within her own party, she had made sure to take her PPS, Ian Gow, with her to Lusaka, to have him be part of the deal and in a position to sell it to the party’s right, with which he was sympathetic.* There were rumblings on the right at the party conference in October, but nothing unmanageable. For the first but by no means the last time, Mrs Thatcher was able to force something upon her party which they would have found unpalatable coming from almost anyone else.
17
‘Cuts’
‘I asked for too little, didn’t I?’
On her first day in office, Mrs Thatcher saw briefs from the Cabinet Secretary and the Think Tank (CPRS) about the state of the British economy. She also read a copy of the Treasury’s briefing to the Chancellor on the same subject. These documents were relentlessly gloomy.
The Treasury predicted that the Retail Price Index (RPI) would rise to an annual rate of 10–11 per cent in the course of 1979 and that the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR) would rise from £8.5 billion to £10 billion. This increase would result chiefly from the public sector pay settlements proposed by Professor Clegg’s Comparability Commission which, during the campaign, she had promised to implement. John Hunt reminded her of the vast range of public employees – including the armed services, doctors and dentists, ‘top people’, local government non-manual workers, postmen and teachers – whose pay she would shortly have to settle. In a separate note on timing, Hunt told her that the priority was the Budget. Second, ‘close behind in terms of time, and ahead in terms both of intrinsic importance and inherent difficulty, is the development … of a strategy for public expenditure.’ The outgoing Labour government had been putting up spending by 3 per cent per year in real terms since the austerity of 1977–8, and had left plans in train for more of the same. Summarizing, Hunt wrote: ‘the overall picture in the short term on present policies is a rising rate of inflation and slow growth, leading to continued uncertainty and instability.’1
The CPRS, as was its role, gave a broader context: ‘our industrial performance has been so poor for so long that in Western industrial terms we have now become a low productivity, cheap labour, country.’ It noted that unemployment was at present accepted ‘with surprising equanimity’, but foresaw that ‘if unemployment were to increase sharply, the present equable acceptance might break down, especially in the Inner Cities, with large numbers of young coloureds unable to find jobs.’ The world trade situation was bad, and ‘The UK is now exposed to the “Dutch disease” – the tendency of oil and gas revenues to raise the exchange rate,’ a tendency which would be reinforced, it said, by monetarist policies. It recommended leaving more oil in the ground, loosening exchange controls and joining the ERM. Income tax thresholds should rise, the high rates should be cut (though this could be delayed), and indirect taxes should be put up. Public spending should be cut, partly by means of ‘staff cuts’, and also by the ‘contentious’ means of indexing benefits to prices rather than earnings. There was ‘consensus’, said the Think Tank, which clearly did not yet know Mrs Thatcher’s allergy to that word, that the main problems facing the nation were ‘inflation, industrial performance, and unemployment, in that order’.2 The paper did not mention trade union reform as a remedy for any of the above.
The dismal economic news was not unexpected for Mrs Thatcher, though Tim Lankester, who, as her economics private secretary, had to lay it before her, did note, slightly surprised, that ‘she wasn’t terribly well briefed on the macroeconomic problems when she arrived’.3 In a way, it was helpful to Mrs Thatcher that things were so bad. Only disaster had led voters to reject the soothing approach of Jim Callaghan. Only disaster would incline them to accept the nasty medicine that the strict new nurse was offering. The Conservatives had fought the election on the need for economic change, and now had a decent mandate for bringing it about. Although the Tory old guard were known to be worried by monetarism, economic liberalism and public spending cuts, they had no alternative analysis or programme. The scope for radicalism seemed clear.
But there was an enormous gulf between the seriousness of the situation and the practical readiness of the new government to do something about it. There was a potentially fatal combination of the natural complacency of the Conservative Party and the ingrained pessimism of a bureaucracy that had managed decline for more than a generation. Mrs Thatcher was instinctively alert to this problem, and feared, from the moment that she first sat at her desk, that events might run away from her. She began immediately to scribble with frantic energy over the briefs she received. Civil servants quickly came to recognize that her repeated underscoring of a passage with straight lines signified approval. A wavy line meant the opposite. Virtually never writing separate memoranda of her own, she preferred the margins of the document she received from others. There she would express her feelings with some violence. ‘No!!’, or ‘No’ (underlined three times), or even, as was much later to become famous in another context, ‘No. No. No.’ In his initial memo of 4 May 1979, John Hunt asked her to confirm that ‘comparability (properly carried out) is the key to establishing public sector pay.’4 ‘No’, she wrote, choosing to ignore the fact that she had committed her party to honour the findings of the Clegg Comparability Commission which were due in August. And when Hunt drafted her a memorandum for Cabinet discussion on pay and cash limits, setting out the options on the subject, she wrote on his covering note: ‘Discussion on this paper in Cabinet would be futile – and on any other paper which raises such enormous questions and supplies so few answers! It would weaken our hand – not strengthen it. Delete from Agenda.’5 From the very beginning, she dreaded using the Cabinet as a place where people,
especially people who did not agree with her, could merely air opinions: she wanted it to focus on action.
Over the future of Clegg, in fact, Mrs Thatcher was determined to avoid further commitment. She saw the basic principle of comparability – the idea that wages could be determined by comparing them with those of other workers rather than being based on productivity and affordability – as wrong and financially ruinous. The institutional bias in favour of keeping the arrangement was very strong, however, and during the election campaign she had committed the Tories, despite Geoffrey Howe’s opposition, to honouring Clegg’s findings. A plan was in place to appoint a successor to Professor Clegg when he stepped down, and the expectation was that some sort of overall machinery for comparing and determining public sector pay would have to continue. On 16 May, Hunt wrote to Mrs Thatcher to say that ‘arguments against dismantling the Commission at this stage look conclusive.’6 But she was determined to avoid anything but a short-term commitment. She also wanted to alter the way Clegg did his work. She went through the biographies of the proposed new members of the Commission trying to suggest people more sympathetic to her stance. What about Professor Patrick Minford,* she asked, or the businessman Frank McFadzean ‘or someone of similar views [underlined three times]?’ And she tried to change Clegg’s terms of reference to ‘consider the economic consequences of any award’.7 When she realized that such changes might serve only to entrench Clegg, she got the Cabinet to agree to a holding position in which no new members should be added since this might imply government support for an ongoing role for the Commission. Presented with a draft parliamentary answer to a question asking whether Clegg would be abolished, she struck out the word ‘No’, but left the rest about ‘completing its existing work’ to stand.8 Clegg clung to life because of the fear of industrial disruption from winding it down too quickly. It was not until August 1980 that its abolition was announced.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 61
