Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Her officials were faintly pleased. They had been telling her ‘for months and months’ that Reagan did not understand a great deal. Now, felt Whitmore, ‘The scales fell from her eyes.’145

  The bickering continued through the summer. Mrs Thatcher wrote to Reagan to say that John Brown would indeed suffer severely following the US sanctions. He wrote back, maintaining his position that it would not. The disagreement was publicly known, with Mrs Thatcher characteristically taking her stand not on the rights and wrongs of the pipeline itself (she did not much like it), but on a rule-of-law argument that there could be no American jurisdiction over British companies.146 At the end of July, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Reagan to say that she would forbid four companies, including John Brown, from complying with American law. She did so, however, in a conciliatory tone: ‘I should like to stress that we are taking … no more than the absolute minimum action. I am very anxious that this matter should not be allowed to escalate and thus become a serious irritant in our relations … I would very much hope that your administration would respond in the same spirit.’ On his copy of this telegram, Reagan wrote, ‘We must keep our relationship on the level it is as exemplified by this message,’147 and he replied formally in similar vein. By September, the Pentagon had started to increase its own purchases from John Brown, as a sort of covert compensation.

  There is no doubt that Mrs Thatcher’s displeasure did weigh with Reagan. Roger Robinson recalled: ‘The President felt the pressure of his relationship with Mrs Thatcher on this matter. He would ask us periodically about progress towards our goals. “Can we lift these damn things yet?” he would say.’148 But what really broke the impasse was Reagan’s decision to replace Secretary of State Al Haig with George Shultz* at the end of June. Shultz recalled, ‘I said to President Reagan, “This is a wasting asset. As time goes on, our companies are all being engineered out of this project anyway. We should try to get what we can out of this.” ’ Shultz understood the wider context which worried Mrs Thatcher so much: ‘I had it very much in mind that the following year was going to be the year of missile deployment in Europe. We couldn’t afford to go into that year with this dispute in the air, so we got it settled.’149 This was the case that Haig had put too, but Shultz, personally closer to Reagan and with new authority, was able to get a better hearing.

  At the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in October, Shultz won agreement. In return for the lifting of American sanctions, the allies would develop a series of security-minded East–West economic policies. There would be a review of energy alternatives for Western Europe and no new Soviet gas-supply contracts signed. ‘I worked out a deal whereby we got a beefed-up agreement among the like-minded countries not to sell things to the Russians. Margaret was very co-operative with that. The proposed settlement was something that she agreed with and so she was an ally in that sense, although she was opposed to the sanctions.’150 Many hawks opposed Shultz’s agreement. ‘I don’t know that this is enough to give up the pipeline sanctions,’ said Cap Weinberger,151 but Shultz prevailed. Face was saved.* On 13 November 1982, Reagan announced that the sanctions would be lifted. The hawks stressed the delay they had caused to the pipeline and the additional costs imposed on the Soviets. They also noted that construction of a proposed second strand to the pipeline had been suspended indefinitely. The view in the British Embassy, however, was that the Americans had suffered a great defeat, although officials were given strict instructions not to say so.152 John Brown would now be permitted to sell its equipment to Moscow after all and pipeline construction would proceed. Mrs Thatcher sent a telegram to Reagan. The lifting of sanctions was ‘very good news’, she said, ‘I am pleased that we have all been able to reach agreement on a common approach to the handling of East/West relations, particularly at a time when we must be seen to be standing together.’153

  The pipeline episode proved the untruth of the accusation that Mrs Thatcher was ever the poodle of the United States. She argued her case with a frankness and tenacity which caused shock in Washington. And she did, after ten months of wrangling, prevail. The alliance stayed intact, and ready for the much more important business of INF deployment in Europe the following year. But the row forced Mrs Thatcher to be more realistic about her greatest ally, and to be aware that, even with her prestige as high as it was at the end of the Falklands War, she could not expect an easy ride.

  Three days before Reagan announced the lifting of sanctions, Leonid Brezhnev, the President of the Soviet Union, died. The Foreign Office sent Mrs Thatcher a draft of the proforma letter of condolence that she was to send. In her own hand, she deleted anything suggestive of grief, and added the sentence, ‘The consequences of his death will be felt far beyond the frontiers of his own country.’154 It was intended as an optimistic prophecy, not a funerary platitude. She was looking to the future, and hoping for change.

  21

  Hunger in Ireland

  ‘The lady behind the veil’

  By the time Mrs Thatcher became prime minister, she did not have a policy towards Northern Ireland. It had died with Airey Neave just as the election campaign began. As well as the loss of a friend and ally, Neave’s death was, she recalled, ‘a terrible blow, because I’d never thought of anyone else for Northern Ireland … He understood the “Irish factor”. He’d studied it.’1 She considered Humphrey Atkins, whom she made secretary of state, ‘a very nice person’2 and was even said by some to have a tendresse for him, but he did not want the job,3 and knew nothing about the subject. Mrs Thatcher, and not Atkins, would therefore be the one to give a lead on Northern Ireland, but she herself did not know very much either.

  More important, she had little feel for the problem. She did not go so far as Denis, who had an English, saloon-bar impatience with the whole thing: ‘If the Irish want to kill each other that does seem to me to be their business.’4 Indeed, Mrs Thatcher was, in principle, a strong Unionist, but she nevertheless possessed what Robert Armstrong, whose part in the Irish drama was to prove central, called ‘a very English Englishness’,5 and little natural rapport with the people whose cause she believed she favoured. She admired what she regarded as the thrifty attitudes of Ulster people, and, as Secretary of State for Education (although schools were a matter devolved to the Northern Ireland government at Stormont), she had been impressed by what little she had seen of the province’s educational standards.6 But she was an outsider looking in. In private conversation, she had a rather revealing way of expressing her attitude: ‘Airey was a convinced Unionist and, in a way, so was I, because they had been jolly loyal to us.’7 She always thought of the people of Northern Ireland, even the Unionist population, as ‘they’, quite separate from ‘us’.

  In addition, she found the Irish, on both sides, irritating – their preference for cultural politics over the more clear-cut economic debates at Westminster, their prolixity and what she believed to be their unreliability. ‘You don’t expect anything decent to come from an Irishman,’ she said in private,8 and she was only half in jest. She also found it extremely hard to take in the idea that citizens of her own country might feel that they owed allegiance to another. In private conversation in retirement, she once said that Nationalists in the North were ‘traitors’ because of their wish for British withdrawal and a united Ireland. Then she stopped herself: ‘No, no. I shouldn’t say that. That is not the right word.’9 But she never worked out what the right word was. The whole business upset her. In her memoirs, it is this tone of crossness and exasperation which dominates when she writes about Northern Ireland. As with all important questions of policy, she treated it with care and attention, and worked hard at it. She was invariably brave in the face of threats of violence, and felt a strong rapport with all those, especially soldiers and policemen, who had to deal with terrorism. Almost her first intervention on the subject of Northern Ireland after coming into office was to take up a letter from a member of the public who complained that British troops in the province were ill equipped (‘we m
ust take this very seriously indeed’).10 But, unlike economic matters, or East–West relations, Northern Ireland was a subject which, though she would not have put it so, she wished would go away.

  Airey Neave was a famously secretive man, and his attitude to Northern Ireland will forever be disputed. Some believed that he had become a convinced integrationist, arguing that the province should be administered in the same way as other parts of the United Kingdom. If this was his position, it would have been momentous, had he had the chance to act on it. It would have reversed the policy, pursued in one way or another since the partition of Ireland in 1921, by which Northern Ireland was treated as a place apart. Even after British troops arrived to restore order in the province in 1969, and the Unionist-dominated Stormont Parliament was replaced by direct rule from London in 1972, the prevailing British orthodoxy was that Northern Ireland should be governed, though still under the Crown, by different rules from those prevailing in Westminster. Devolution and ‘power-sharing’, which ensured places in government for both sides of the community, were considered sacred, even if, because of conflict, they were usually suspended in favour of direct rule. Others thought, however, that Neave was more pragmatic, and, seeing how the power-sharing devolution established by the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 had collapsed, was simply taking things very slowly and cautiously.* The wording of the Conservative election manifesto of 1979 captured Neave’s deliberate ambiguity: ‘In the absence of devolved government, we will seek to establish one or more elected regional councils with a wide range of powers over local services.’ These actually quite non-committal words gave heart to Unionists in Ulster and within the Tory Party, because they appeared to encourage the idea that the province could return to governing itself, at least in local matters, without the imposition of power-sharing or the intervention of the Irish Republic. But they did not constitute a veto on devolution.

  When she came into office, Mrs Thatcher found no expectation among her civil servants that much attention should be paid to the manifesto policy. The memo from the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, which awaited her on her first day, told her that a ‘new initiative’ was widely expected, and that ‘Expectations are also high in Dublin and the United States.’ Mrs Thatcher put her wiggly line of doubt under the words ‘new initiative’ (the phrase invariably referred to some form of power-sharing devolution and/or an ‘Irish dimension’) and ‘Dublin’.11

  ‘Dublin’, though, was worried by the manifesto’s regional-councils commitment. Although history has officially recorded that the first foreign head of government to visit Mrs Thatcher as prime minister was Helmut Schmidt of Germany, it was actually Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach (prime minister),* who got in first with a ‘courtesy call’ just before she met Schmidt on 10 May. The discussion, at least on Lynch’s side, went beyond courtesies. The note of the meeting shows that Mrs Thatcher voiced no opinions beyond saying that Northern Ireland presented a problem ‘which did not yield to instant solutions’. Lynch, though, had come with an agenda: ‘Mr Lynch referred to the late Airey Neave’s ideas on Regional Councils.’ These, he said, would lead to ‘discrimination in housing matters … This process could quickly break down the goodwill which had slowly been created.’12 The nationalist SDLP, whom Dublin was trying to encourage, regarded power-sharing as the sine qua non for their participation in Northern Ireland politics.

  In the United States, President Jimmy Carter came under pressure from the Irish-American lobby. ‘I am sure that a personal expression of interest by you to Mrs. Thatcher will encourage the new Government to pursue a political solution more vigorously,’ Tip O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote to Carter.13 The President promptly called Mrs Thatcher personally and asked her for a paper setting out the situation in Northern Ireland. Contrary to O’Neill’s hopes, Mrs Thatcher made the document as cautious on politics and as tough on security as possible. Carter’s administration acquiesced in Congressional efforts to prevent the supply of US Ruger personal-protection weapons to the Royal Ulster Constabulary despite a personal appeal from Mrs Thatcher. Meeting with Carter in December 1979 she told the President that ‘She herself had handled both the gun which the RUC at present used’ and the new gun being requested: ‘There was no doubt that the American Ruger was much better.’ ‘It had never occurred to her that there would be a problem about completing the order,’ she continued, demanding to know whether the President’s difficulty was one of ‘principle or timing’. Carter pleaded the latter, limply ceding leadership to the Congress: ‘The President said that he himself would like to approve the sale but did not wish to be defeated in Congress or to have a major altercation with them.’14 Governor Hugh Carey of New York tried to drag Humphrey Atkins and the Irish Foreign Minister together to meet him to discuss a plan for the future of the province. Mrs Thatcher intervened to prevent this, telling Atkins that he should not see Carey, because ‘Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and she herself would not think of discussing with President Carter, for example, US policy towards his black population.’15

  Looking at the matter from a very different point of view, Ian Paisley’s* sectarian Democratic Unionists also opposed integration with the rest of the United Kingdom. They had adopted various positions on this matter in the past, but after ‘the Big Man’s’ success in topping the poll in the European elections in Northern Ireland in June 1979 Paisley now saw himself as more powerful. Integration would destroy Paisley’s dream of becoming, in constitutional fact, what he wrote to tell Mrs Thatcher he already was – ‘the leader of Ulster’.16 The right sort of devolution could assist it. As for her senior Cabinet colleagues, all those with any experience in the field, with the partial exception of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, were personally committed to some version of power-sharing and a greater role for the Irish Republic. The Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, was chairman of the ministerial group on policy in Northern Ireland. As one of the architects of the Sunningdale Agreement, which, under Ted Heath, had imposed power-sharing upon Northern Ireland in 1973 (and had failed because of the Ulster Workers’ Strike the following year), he was never going to depart from that mental model. His usual answer to all the ills of Northern Ireland was: ‘When things get bad, have a conference.’17

  In short, almost all the players in the drama were against anything resembling the policy orphaned by the death of Neave. The only exceptions to this were the ‘Official’ Unionists, the largest political party in Northern Ireland, formally called the Ulster Unionist Party, led by Jim Molyneaux* and provided with intellectual rigour by Enoch Powell. They had allies in the Tory Party, of whom by far the most important was Ian Gow. The only other exception was Mrs Thatcher herself, and although she knew what she did not like, she did not really have a coherent policy of her own.

  Northern Ireland therefore lacked direction for the first few months of Mrs Thatcher’s time in office. She and the whole government were busy with other things. What changed matters was the assassination on 27 August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten and, on the same day, the murder of eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint, both carried out by the IRA. One obvious effect of these atrocities was to strengthen Mrs Thatcher in her conviction of the need for strong security measures and much greater pressure on the Republic to prevent terrorism. The Republic was ‘harbouring known murderers’,18 she angrily told a meeting of senior ministers the following day, and she wanted to use ‘leverage against the Republic’, including ‘administrative action against Irish immigrants’,19 to get the extradition of suspects to Britain. Fired up by the success of her morale-boosting visit to the province in the wake of the outrages, Mrs Thatcher was full of eagerness to sort out the lack of co-ordination between the army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and to make cross-border security co-operation a reality. With typically energetic sympathy, she wrote letters to the families of each of the eighteen murdered soldiers, each one different, and all in her own hand. No prime minister had ever thought of doing this befo
re. It was a custom which she was to maintain. As well as giving comfort to the families, it served to remind Mrs Thatcher, after each death, of the human cost of Ulster’s tragedy.†

  A second meeting with Jack Lynch was arranged to coincide with his visit to London for Lord Mountbatten’s funeral. Humphrey Atkins asked Mrs Thatcher to promise the Taoiseach ‘political progress’. ‘I see no possibility of opening up in this way with Mr Lynch,’ she replied. ‘… The most we can contemplate going to is preparation for effective local government. The rest sounds too much as if we are treating them [Northern Ireland] as a colony – not as part of the UK.’20 Instead, at the meeting, Mrs Thatcher pressed Lynch to do more about security. Lynch’s reaction was to say that everything was very difficult. He preferred a political solution, agreed between the two governments. Mrs Thatcher, in her turn, was cautious: ‘It would help enormously if people would stop talking about the total unity of Ireland.’21 At a plenary meeting on the same day, matters became heated. Backed by an unusually hawkish Carrington, Mrs Thatcher warned Lynch that ‘she would be unable to restrain public opinion in this country if … she and Mr Lynch were unable to point to anything new [on security] that would be done.’ She ‘asked whether the Irish side were prepared to get down to brass tacks’.22 The Irish delegation were taken aback by her vehemence, and Lynch was slow to reply. George Colley, the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister), tried to argue back. According to Dermot Nally,* then Deputy Secretary to the Department of the Taoiseach, who was present as part of the Irish delegation, ‘One of the ministers made the remark that “You may not like the idea but some people have a quantity of sympathy with the men of violence.” That made her furious. “Are you condoning murder?” She nearly had to be held back. The meeting with Lynch was not a success.’23