Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Stowe considered that what the SIS officer was offering was ‘a façade of concessions about the treatment of prisoners which gave them a ladder to climb down’.56 The concessions were presented as ‘humanitarian’, and therefore applicable to all prisoners in Northern Ireland, not just terrorist ones – civilian clothing from their families to be worn during visits and recreation to be permitted as quickly as possible, ‘civilian-type’ clothing during the working day, free association at weekends, the prospect of restored remission. The central issue on which the government said it would not move was control and authority. On 18 December 1980, the prisoners climbed down the ladder available and ended their strike. Atkins duly announced the ‘humanitarian’ concessions and had to fend off charges that the government had made a deal with the strikers. Nevertheless, the strike’s collapse was a victory for Mrs Thatcher. But the very fact that the government insisted that these limited concessions were not connected to the strike contained the seeds of future trouble. The prisoners naturally wanted to believe that they had won real concessions and were quick to seek evidence of bad faith. The IRA had also learnt something vital, which they had known in the past but doubted in the case of Mrs Thatcher – the British government, including the Prime Minister herself, were prepared to take part in what was, in effect, negotiation.57 After a strike which they had not really wanted, they pocketed this knowledge to help them plan better next time.

  In later years, Mrs Thatcher recalled the moment when she heard of the end of the strike. She was presiding over the office Christmas party at No. 10 when Michael Alexander came up the stairs to give her the good news. ‘I remember thinking that we had ended for all time the method of the hunger strike.’58 It was not to be.

  Mrs Thatcher was fortunate that the failure of the hunger strike burnished her reputation for toughness, because her summit with Charles Haughey ten days earlier had caused outrage among Unionists. As so often in Irish matters, occasions which she regarded as minimal and practical were seen by the Republic as mightily symbolic. This was the first prime-minister-led bilateral delegation of British ministers to Dublin since Partition, and it took place on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The venue, Dublin Castle, was the old seat of British power. Due to a last-minute decision for Mrs Thatcher to land on the lawn there, rather than arriving at Baldonnell aerodrome, she was early, and the only people present to greet her were junior officials and electricians making final preparations for the visit. One official took her on an impromptu tour of the Castle. He recalled:

  She was going about in her usual bossy fashion saying ‘What’s that?’ … She walked into a room and saw a big plaque on the wall in the Irish language, and she said in her usual fashion, ‘What does that say?’ An official was starting to stammer out what it was when a worker, who was fixing a light switch, turned and said, ‘I’ll tell you what it is, ma’am. That’s the sign that says this is where youse took James Connolly [the socialist Republican trade union leader and commander of the Dublin Brigade in the 1916 Rising] before youse took him out and shot him.’ She said, ‘Oh, very interesting,’ and they marched on. It was the best possible introduction to a meeting with Charlie Haughey because Charlie would have to explain that in Ireland the wounds of history were still very open, and it would take work to move things on.59

  Mrs Thatcher arrived with a high-powered delegation, including Carrington and Geoffrey Howe. In her mind, this was to emphasize the fact that a wide range of business, especially relating to the EEC – rather than merely Northern Ireland – was being transacted; but in Irish eyes it added to the historical significance of the occasion. She had been briefed that the Irish were looking for an intergovernmental way of making progress. Whenever this had been suggested, she had put a wavy line against it. Her briefing paper about the UK’s objectives for the meeting was expressed with almost comically agonized care – the pressure from officialdom for movement in a ‘green’ (that is, Irish Nationalist) direction reined in by the knowledge that she was intensely suspicious: ‘Cautiously to explore the extent to which it may be possible, in the United Kingdom’s interest, to devise arrangements under which the Northern Ireland problem can be considered by the two governments in the context of an evolving “unique relationship”. But to avoid any commitment which would risk provoking a loyalist backlash in Northern Ireland.’60

  The meeting itself went well enough. Haughey told Mrs Thatcher that he wanted a conference in 1981 which could end the violence and review ‘in a fundamental way the totality of our relationship’. Mrs Thatcher primly replied that it was ‘too soon for such a conference’,61 but agreed to the idea of ‘joint studies’ which might develop ‘new structures’ of co-operation. She declared herself pleased with security co-operation. Before lunch, Haughey had shown Mrs Thatcher the throne room in Dublin Castle and invited her to sit on the throne once occupied by Queen Victoria. She ‘firmly’ declined, but suggested Haughey should do so if he wished. ‘Both laughed.’62 After Mrs Thatcher had left the Castle, Haughey returned to the throne room. One of his officials turned to him and told him he could now sit on the throne with impunity: ‘Sure after today aren’t you the King of Ireland?’63 Leonard Figg, the new British Ambassador to Dublin, reported to Michael Alexander that Haughey sat on the throne, ‘his feet not quite touching the floor, and told the company they should now all kneel. He has a good sense of fun, and we might take comfort from the fact that he clearly thought the day had gone well.’64

  One must doubt whether Mrs Thatcher was pleased with this image of a clowning pseudo-king of Ireland occupying the former seat of British royalty. She was certainly not happy that Haughey felt the day had gone so well, because his success, she believed, had been bought at her expense. The trouble lay in the communiqué. It announced that the leaders’ next meeting, in 1981, would be devoted to ‘the totality of relationships within these islands’, and that the Joint Studies had been commissioned ‘for this purpose’. There was uproar from Unionists, who thought that Dublin would now have a role in deciding the future of the province. Enoch Powell described the summit as a ‘mini-Munich’. Ian Paisley raged, and insulted Mrs Thatcher at a meeting which he had with her before Christmas. The following month, he began a ‘Carson trail’ of rallies of men, sometimes holding up shotgun licences to show their readiness to fight, in imitation of Edward Carson, the great leader of early twentieth-century Unionism.

  Mrs Thatcher afterwards blamed herself for not having given her usual minute attention to the drafting of the communiqué. She had not understood the incendiary implication of the phrase ‘the totality of relationships’. Her officials, such as Stowe, who had drafted it, almost certainly did, but, perhaps because they supported the idea, had not warned her. ‘Ever after that,’ Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘I was wary.’65

  The situation was then made much worse by the Irish Foreign Minister, Brian Lenihan,* who told BBC Radio Ulster: ‘As far as we are concerned, everything is on the table. This attitude had been the consistent attitude of the Taoiseach and, as far as new institutional structures are concerned, we regard them as new political ways of resolving the problem that exists between North and South, within Northern Ireland itself and between the two parts of Ireland and Britain.’66 In March of the following year, Lenihan made further public remarks, this time about how he envisaged that a federal structure for the whole of Ireland might emerge from Anglo-Irish discussions. Haughey and Mrs Thatcher met in the margins of the European Council at Maastricht. She told Haughey that Lenihan’s outbursts ‘might well have “undone” everything’.67 Haughey admitted that the whole thing was a ‘mess’. Dermot Nally, who was present at the conversation, remembered Mrs Thatcher’s anger: ‘ “I said nothing about the constitution, nothing whatsoever was said.” She went on and on and on. She was so vitriolic in her criticism. This destroyed her belief in the idea that she could reach agreement with Haughey. It destroyed her faith in him.’68

  The process, however, was not destroyed. The Joint St
udies gave British and Irish officials what bureaucrats always need in order to advance their processes – a framework of regular contact. After the row about the communiqué, British officials were nervous. They feared Mrs Thatcher’s displeasure about how they would proceed. In a masterly piece of mandarin handling, Robert Armstrong wrote to her to explain that the Foreign Office, which would normally be in charge of discussions with a foreign country, wished to stay out of the Joint Studies. Lord Carrington, he told her, was worried about ‘possible suggestions that he and his Department are associated with “sell-out” e.g. over Rhodesia or the Falklands* and are preparing to play a similar role in the Irish question.’69 Carrington also thought that the Taoiseach’s office, run by Nally, and not the Irish Foreign Ministry, should handle the matter in Dublin. Prudence and symmetry therefore demanded, suggested Armstrong, that the Joint Studies should be handled by the Cabinet Office, run, of course, by Armstrong himself. The Cabinet Secretary added that, for the same reasons relating to ‘sell-out’ accusations, the potentially relevant Wet (not, of course, the word he used) ministers did not want to chair the group in charge of the studies. Willie Whitelaw felt ‘slightly tarred with the Sunningdale brush’.70 The unstated implication was that Mrs Thatcher herself should preside. She did not want to take the hint. ‘I am very unhappy with these proposals,’ she wrote. ‘FO must take the lead – otherwise the relationship with the Republic will be being treated in a wholly different way from other EEC bilaterals.’71 She also wished to avoid being personally associated with an enterprise of which she was so suspicious. But she gave Armstrong the Cabinet Office control which he sought.

  Robert Armstrong was also, in his phrase about Whitelaw, ‘tarred with the Sunningdale brush’, having played an important role as Ted Heath’s principal private secretary at the time of the agreement. He knew, of course, her attitude to Heath and so ‘didn’t remind her of Sunningdale too much … but it went back to that’.72 Armstrong had long had a personal interest in the Irish question, and his mental model was always that of Sunningdale – power-sharing and some sort of Irish dimension, such as the Council of Ireland which Sunningdale had proposed. From the Sunningdale era, he had established a good relationship with Dermot Nally, who, from 1980, was his equivalent in Dublin. To a man of Armstrong’s elite, administrative mind, it was far more attractive to turn arrangements about the future of Northern Ireland into an intergovernmental affair, rather than let them be a matter to be decided chiefly by the inhabitants of the province. This was an additional reason, as well as his sympathy for a united Ireland, for putting his own Cabinet Office in the lead. He wanted the Unionists kept at bay; and although he was close to Kenneth Stowe at the Northern Ireland Office, after Stowe had departed in 1981 he worked quietly to exclude the NIO from major decisions. As Stowe put it, ‘Robert would never have dreamed of going behind my back, but after me, he did.’73 As a loyal, able and professional civil servant, Armstrong was always careful to protect Mrs Thatcher’s position and give her his best advice, but there can be no doubt that he was also trying to push her towards a view of Ireland which she did not like.

  Once the Joint Studies were agreed at Dublin, it was all but inevitable that they would progress in a way which Mrs Thatcher found unwelcome. Armstrong was able to exploit his liaison with Dublin over the Joint Studies to find out what Dublin thought and move the political situation forward. As well as travelling to Dublin himself, he sent his deputy, Robert Wade-Gery, there for secret meetings with officials in the Taioseach’s office. Wade-Gery recalled that they were ‘very gingerly’ beginning to talk about what would eventually, in 1985, become the Anglo-Irish Agreement.74 Some of these meetings took place even before the Joint Studies were under way. Because of the need for security, Wade-Gery did not go near the British Embassy in Dublin for these encounters, but travelled under a concealed identity. He would walk past the Taioseach’s office at a prearranged time and ‘a door in the wall would open’. Such contacts were not forbidden – ‘Mrs Thatcher would have had to OK them’ – but their full content was not known to the Prime Minister. In Wade-Gery’s view, Mrs Thatcher was anti-Irish and ‘not at all reasonable. It was a long process of persuading her that it was worth doing.’75 In addition to his more informal activities, Wade-Gery was also in charge of drafting the reports of the Joint Studies. So he, too, had the right cover.

  As the plans for the Joint Studies developed, Mrs Thatcher did what she could to modify their work and challenge their assumptions. In January 1981, she handed the terms of reference over to Ian Gow and asked him for his suggestions. He added extradition from the Republic under the heading of ‘citizenship rights’ and said that one task of the Studies should be ‘to review the claim of Irish Constitution [expressed in Articles Two and Three] to part of the territory of the United Kingdom’.76 His ideas were not followed through. Mrs Thatcher herself was nervous of pressing the Republic on its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland because, she told Enoch Powell, she wanted the Joint Studies to discuss ‘only institutional and not constitutional matters. If the Prime Minister were to seek to raise the constitutional issue with the Irish Government, it would then seek to raise the constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom, and that was something which the Prime Minister would never agree to discuss.’77* The one issue which Unionists were prepared to discuss with the Republic was thus ruled out of order by Mrs Thatcher. For some time, the precise format of the Joint Studies remained vague, and the secrecy surrounding them added to Unionist concerns. The original communiqué had explained that the Studies concerned ‘possible new institutional structures, citizenship rights, security matters, economic cooperation and measures to encourage mutual understanding’. The wide-ranging nature of the agenda allowed the officials to discuss anything they wanted. Although the phrase had caused Mrs Thatcher so much trouble, the Joint Studies did, in fact, cover the ‘totality of relationships within these islands’, and this formula reappeared when the reports were published almost a year later. The main purpose of the whole thing was to lay the ground for a more formal relationship between the two governments, while making the idea seem as inoffensive as possible.

  In March 1981, Wade-Gery reported to Armstrong that the Irish government was looking for an Anglo-Irish Council to emerge from the Joint Studies, and a joint parliamentary forum too. Their ‘eventual objective was a federal Ireland’.78 Mrs Thatcher was perturbed and called a meeting of the key figures – Whitelaw, Carrington, Ian Gilmour, who now chaired the Joint Studies work, Atkins, Armstrong and Wade-Gery (all of whom, with the partial exception of Atkins, privately disagreed with her). She complained that ‘The talks were moving faster than she had originally contemplated’ and said she particularly disliked the word ‘Council’: ‘… Mr Haughey would certainly exaggerate `the significance of whatever was achieved.’79 When the full set of Joint Studies papers were presented at the end of April, she finally exploded:

  This is the most alarming set of papers on the UK/Irish situation I have read. They reveal starkly a total difference of approach. We are trying to achieve increasing cooperation and reconciliation between our two countries … They are using every study as a step towards takeover. If these papers go ahead to publication even on an agree to differ basis, I am not prepared to go along with the studies. The Irish view would incur such mistrust, hostility and downright anger in the North that it would set Anglo-Irish relations back for years and do untold harm to many innocent people if the Protestant paramilitary groups reacted. It is no longer a question of changing the wording of a few sentences. We are at the heart of the matter.

  All over the studies, sometimes as often as four times on the same page, she wrote ‘NO’, and, in extremis, ‘NO!’ When British officials suggested that the word ‘Council’ should be conceded in order to keep Irish goodwill, she wrote, ‘What about our good will?’ To the Irish suggestion that their citizens should sit on juries and hold elected office in the North, she wrote: ‘This is mon
strous.’80 Her argument and her indignation were classic encapsulations of Mrs Thatcher’s approach to the project. She strongly disliked the whole vision while not having any very clear idea of what she wanted to do instead. The consequence of her fury, assisted by the calling of another general election in the Republic for June, was a pause for reflection and redrafting.

  It is remarkable, given everything else that was happening, that Mrs Thatcher devoted such close attention to this large and often tedious bundle of documents. The Joint Studies process coincided with the economic and political crisis which followed the 1981 Budget and the Brixton riots in April.* And in Northern Ireland itself a second and much more formidable hunger strike was by now in progress. On the day Mrs Thatcher wrote her angry note on the Joint Studies, she knew that the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, was on the point of death.

  Early in January 1981, Mrs Thatcher had been informed that the hard men in the Maze were trying to engineer a second hunger strike. Allegations were made that the British had failed to implement the concessions offered via the earlier contact, but it seems likely that these grievances, though genuinely felt, were a pretext. From the point of view of the IRA prisoners, the fact that the first strike had failed meant that, for reasons of pride, there had to be a second one which would succeed. Atkins informed Mrs Thatcher that the strike was essentially about political status and that the prisoners sought at least one death.81 Sands, who was leader of the IRA prisoners in the Maze until he went on hunger strike, was a romantic, violent, poetry-loving young man, in prison for trying to blow up a furniture showroom. His wife had left him because he beat her up.82 He felt he had little to lose by dying. On 1 March, Sands began the strike himself. On 5 March, speaking in Belfast, Mrs Thatcher reiterated her simple position: ‘There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.’83 On the same day, Frank Maguire, the Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died. Sands, from his prison bed, became a candidate for his seat. It was thought by Republicans that if Sands were elected to Parliament the case for political status would become unanswerable. A decision by the SDLP not to contest the election made Sands the only candidate of the Nationalist side and, on 9 April, he was elected. Riots ensued. Until then, Provisional Sinn Fein–IRA had shunned the electoral process, but now the fact that an IRA man could win a popular contest in the United Kingdom gave them a huge propaganda boost.