Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2
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To stand on the ancient ways,
To see which is the right and good way,
And in that way to walk.8
To her party conference in October, she said that the Falklands had not brought about the recovery of British patriotism, but had proved that such patriotism ‘was never really lost’.9 Speaking of the young men who had just fought, she said: ‘If this is tomorrow’s generation, then Britain has little to fear in the years to come.’10 At the end of 1982, for a television programme broadcast in March 1983, Mrs Thatcher showed the South African writer Sir Laurens van der Post* round 10 Downing Street. Disarmed by van der Post’s flattery, she revealed how much her choice of pictures and decorations for the house was influenced by her self-identification with the high points of Britain’s greatness. She pointed out the Chinese Chippendale table which had belonged to Clive of India, Pitt the Younger’s desk and the portraits of Nelson and Wellington (‘I … thought of him very much because I was very upset at the people who lost their lives in the Falklands … he walked around the battlefield [of Waterloo] totally and utterly sickened and grief-stricken by it’).11 She showed off the silver from Belton House near her home town of Grantham, lent by ‘a great friend of mine, Lord Brownlow’, which had belonged to one of his ancestors who was Speaker of the House of Commons. In acknowledgment of her own scientific background, she was building up ‘a little scientific gallery’ in the small dining room, with pictures or busts of Humphry Davy, Joseph Priestley and Grantham’s most famous son, Isaac Newton. A bust of Michael Faraday, who pioneered the generation of electricity, was too heavy for the room, and stood downstairs. In the Cabinet Room, she pointed out, she sat in ‘Winston’s chair’.
With the Downing Street setting providing these props for the Thatcher psychodrama, van der Post drew her out. ‘Would you have been a Roundhead or a Cavalier?’ he inquired. ‘Oh, no slightest shadow,’ replied the woman often accused of being a puritan, ‘… I’d have been a Cavalier, a Royalist.’12* Reminiscence about the wartime ‘dam-busters’ being received in Grantham when her father was mayor caused her to reflect that ‘the battles of peace are even more difficult to solve than the battles of war’. In peace, she said, ‘it’s a question of creating your own inner challenge.’ ‘The values of a free society’ derived from religion, not from the state, she went on. She invoked her favourite hymn ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’, with its phrase about ‘soul by soul’, to show that individuals must take up the challenge, because ‘you believe in something which is greater than yourself’.
In material transcribed but not broadcast, Mrs Thatcher gave even fuller rein to her beliefs about English-speaking freedom and law. She reverted to her childhood fascination with India, in whose civil service she had aspired to work. She said that the British record there had been blemished by the colour bar, but all the same ‘we taught what was right and we upheld what was right,’ and it was the Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield who had, as she put it, ‘let the black go’ in a famous eighteenth-century court case (Somerset vs Stewart, 1772), thereby signalling the end of slavery. The Empire had stood for ‘incorruptible law – the incorruptible military – the incorruptible civil servants’. And the common law, as pointed out by Blackstone and Coke, was ‘greater than the King’ – ‘fantastically courageous men … who said to the king: “No. These things do not come from a king … these rights come from God, and you are not entitled to set them aside.” ’ The American Constitution (‘that wonderful document’) arose from the same spirit. Much of civilization, she slightly grudgingly admitted, came from Continental Europe, ‘And yet the law came from us. Perhaps because we are an island off Europe and therefore just a little bit different, we’ve developed a little bit differently.’
‘If one were to go into a pub at a time of national crisis,’ Mrs Thatcher averred to van der Post, speaking of something which, because of her traditional attitudes to the role of her sex, she had never done unaccompanied, ‘possibly the phrase you’d hear on everyone’s lips as they discuss things would be: “We’re a free country.” ’ This freedom, she asserted, was a beacon to those under Soviet tyranny. She had watched Alexander Solzhenitsyn being interviewed on the BBC and found it ‘one of the most moving experiences I have ever seen on television … his eyes flashed his sincerity and conviction.’ She believed that the Soviet dissidents were saying to her: ‘Keep them [your values] alive. Defend them, and one day we shall hope to have the same things which you take for granted.’ Soviet Communism, she said, ‘will end … There are many religious currents at work in the Soviet Union, and those will not for ever be denied.’13
A critic of Mrs Thatcher’s historical assertions, reading the full transcript, could easily have mocked her odd mixture of Liberal imperialism and the Tory bloody-mindedness of Lord Salisbury (‘I often look back at his work,’ she claimed). Such a critic could have caricatured her as a member of the Conservative Primrose League – which, before the First World War, was the largest political organization in British history – marching under its slogan of ‘Imperium et Libertas’ (‘Empire and Liberty’). He could have poked holes in her factual accuracy and laughed at her romantic schoolgirl’s idea of a national past teeming with great men and great ideas. But she had her answer for such people. They were, she told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November 1982, part of the ‘army of professional belittlers’ who had held sway in the 1970s. ‘They denigrated our past, undermined our present and had no faith in our future.’14 She had been criticized for preaching ‘the parables of the parlour. But I do not repent: those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis.’15 She maintained her grand simplicities. They may have been historically shaky; they may have sounded, to some, faintly embarrassing; but, whatever they were, they were not arid and utilitarian. They were passionate declarations of belief, made now more clearly than ever.
In January 1983, Brian Walden,* who, of all Mrs Thatcher’s regular television interviewers, was closest to her way of thinking, gave her, on air, a phrase to sum up her creed. Having ascertained from her that she wanted the next general election to be held the following year, but would contemplate calling it as early as June 1983, Walden asked her what vision she would campaign for. Listening to her answer, he said that what she was really putting forward was ‘an approval of what I would call Victorian values’.16 Mrs Thatcher grabbed the phrase: ‘Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country.’ Her interpretation of the period was that ‘As our people prospered, so they used their independence and initiative to prosper others, not compulsion by the State.’17 She cited voluntary schools, hospitals endowed by benefactions, improved prisons and new town halls.18* The phrase ‘Victorian values’ stuck, and was quickly used against Mrs Thatcher. For many, it seemed to stand for inequality and to remind people of poverty, workhouses, children being sent up chimneys and other horrors. But Mrs Thatcher did not retreat. She pointed out that the privations of the period were fewer than those of earlier times. What she liked was the Victorian spirit of improvement and what, a generation later, the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron would call the ‘Big Society’. In her view, even the social reforms proposed in the wartime years, usually claimed by the left, had at first tried to uphold the obligations enjoined by Victorian values. The Beveridge Report of 1942, credited with the invention of the welfare state and the National Health Service, had maintained that ‘The State in organising social security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility’.19 ‘In a caring society,’ she glossed Beveridge, ‘we all care.’ When she attacked trade unions for organized selfishness, she did not condemn unions as such, but reminded them of their Victorian roots as friendly and provident societies. She accused them of straying from their benevolent origins.
The world’s heightened expectations of Mrs Thatcher, and her own post-Falklands rh
etoric about the British commitment to freedom, were soon put to the test by the issue of Hong Kong. This prosperous, capitalist port was a British colony which had flourished despite the hostility of neighbouring Communist China. The island of Hong Kong itself had belonged to Britain absolutely since 1842, but the surrounding New Territories, on which Hong Kong island depended for, among other things, water, were rented from China on a 99-year lease which would expire in 1997. In any case, China rejected Britain’s rights over both freehold and leasehold, claiming that they had been extorted by ‘unequal treaties’. Since Britain could not sustain its claim to the New Territories after 1997, it was obvious that some new arrangement for Hong Kong would have to be agreed. China wanted the whole place back. Although the Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping,† had told Hong Kong businessmen in 1979 to ‘set their hearts at ease’ about the preservation of the capitalist system there, huge doubts remained. The markets and citizens of Hong Kong were becoming increasingly nervous. It seemed to most that Hong Kong’s future needed to be settled soon. The British feared that, if they did not move to obtain an agreement, the Chinese would simply sit still as the deadline approached and ‘wait for the lease to fall in’.20 Then China would occupy the place – if resisted, by force.
In approaching the subject, Mrs Thatcher had no clear model to follow. Hong Kong was not a typical British colony whose people could be given independence, because independence was not on offer. What loomed was the absorption of a free entity – and, worse, a free people – into the dictatorship of the Communist mainland. Emotionally, though not physically, ethnically or economically, Hong Kong more closely resembled the Falklands: most of its people were pro-British and dreaded the rule of the country which laid claim to it. But, unlike in the Falklands, there was a lease which was running out, a land border with the hostile power, and the overwhelming might, in the last resort, of the People’s Liberation Army.
Because of her visit to China as leader of the Opposition in 1977,21 and her general opinion of Communism, Mrs Thatcher strongly disliked the place and feared Chinese power, but she had not until now given the region a great deal of thought. Her first anxiety, after becoming prime minister, had been about immigration. When the ‘Boat People’ had started to flee the Vietnamese Communist regime in 1979, she had been notably reluctant to offer them places in Britain. In a private conversation with her then Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, in June 1979, in which he had raised the Boat People’s plight, she had tastelessly remarked, ‘Well, people go on cruises, don’t they?’,22 words for which she subsequently apologized. Hong Kong presented a greater risk of an influx to Britain if things went wrong, because its citizens held British passports, albeit of an inferior sort which did not guarantee them right of abode.
In March 1982, shortly before his resignation over the Falklands, Carrington wrote to her about the future of Hong Kong. His argument did not focus on the freedom of the more than 5 million people for whom Britain was responsible, but on the danger of them trying to get into Britain if things went wrong. ‘The option of unilateral withdrawal is not really open to us,’23 he wrote, because Hong Kong people* would demand right of admission. Mrs Thatcher underlined his words, and did not, at this point, take up those people’s cause. Nor had she previously been visibly attracted to the idea of bolstering Hong Kong against Chinese threats by giving its people more democratic rights, despite (or because of?) the advocacy of the idea by the young left-leaning MP and former head of the Conservative Research Department Chris Patten* in 1979.24 The colony was run by a combination of business power and the colonial Governor and administration. In January 1982, Sir Percy Cradock,† the British Ambassador in Peking‡ and the most important of the Foreign Office’s ‘China hands’, reported to London that ‘a willingness to cede sovereignty … will be essential to an [sic] satisfactory settlement.’25 On her copy of the telegram Mrs Thatcher’s underlining indicated her approval. No mention was made of the people of Hong Kong. It suited both Communist China and the Foreign Office that the people’s wishes should not be the decisive factor in any equation for the territory’s future. Mrs Thatcher disliked both these entities, but until the second half of 1982 she did not get in their way.
Immediately after the Falklands victory, however, she focused, belatedly, on the issue. The suggestions for her visit to China, planned for late September, were set out by Sir Antony Acland,§ the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. Once of the ‘Main Objectives’ was ‘To contain public expectations of progress … so that confidence in Hong Kong is not undermined’.26 Mrs Thatcher jibbed at this. Her foreign affairs private secretary, John Coles,¶ offered a stronger alternative: ‘To confirm that in discussions with the Chinese on Hong Kong’s future our aim will be to secure a prosperous and secure future for the people of Hong Kong’.27 ‘I much prefer your version,’ Mrs Thatcher scribbled to Coles. With her elevation of the rule of law over the assumptions of diplomacy, she began to pay attention to the treaties with China themselves, questioning the Foreign Office’s idea that these should be discarded just because the Chinese wished them to be.
At a meeting on 28 July with Cradock, Acland, Edward Youde,* the new Governor of Hong Kong, and Francis Pym, the Foreign Secretary, the whole approach was debated. Mrs Thatcher was concerned that China had ‘a fundamental lack of comprehension’ of what was needed to maintain confidence in Hong Kong: ‘The only real guarantee of our position was the international treaties on which it was based.’28 Cradock argued back that the Chinese were determined to assert the sovereignty they believed they had never truly surrendered. Unless Britain surrendered sovereignty in 1997, there would be confrontation. He tried to reassure the Prime Minister that Deng Xiaoping would stick to any agreement he made. Mrs Thatcher did not maintain, head-on, that sovereignty must be preserved at all costs, but she wanted to park the matter and discuss administrative arrangements to perpetuate the current free-market system after 1997. Could Britain not obtain some sort of ‘management contract’ for the territory? She continued to worry about the dangers of immigration. She was not sure what she should do, but she was sure that ‘What she could not do, particularly in the light of the recent Falkland Islands problem, was simply to announce that we had conceded sovereignty over Hong Kong.’29 The meeting agreed that the minimum objective of her visit to China should be that talks about the future of Hong Kong could get going without prejudicial statements being made.
There was a tension between her and the Foreign Office. As John Coles put it, she had ‘a very strong feeling in her mind that it was inconsistent to hand over British territory’. The Foreign Office worked on ‘the long, slow process of overcoming this’.30 Or, as Robin Butler,† her principal private secretary at the time, judged, ‘The Foreign Office was nervous. Her reaction was: “Let them be nervous.” ’31 Percy Cradock, for whom Mrs Thatcher felt respect, even though she tended to disagree with him, recalled what he called the ‘fog’ of her style: ‘She would dot about … sometimes total rubbish and sometimes pretty sharp.’ He would spend his time ‘trying to persuade her of what needed to be done: she’d slide down the cliff face.’32 As the visit to China approached, Mrs Thatcher tried to climb back up the cliff. At a private lunch with Youde and leading Hong Kong people at Downing Street in early September, she challenged the orthodoxy that the Chinese were pragmatic: ‘They were Marxist and their system was centralist. Having been born and bred under a Marxist/Leninist system, they did not understand what was necessary to maintain confidence. Our duty was to the people of Hong Kong, who wished to live under our administration. Her instinct was to concede nothing until it was clear we could obtain precisely what we wanted.’33 Cradock expressed ‘some serious reservations’ about the emerging negotiating stance. It was important to ‘make a bow to the Chinese position on sovereignty’, he warned Pym, to avoid an ‘unhelpful salvo’.34 Putting sovereignty on one side risked the ‘complete failure’ of the visit. Robin Butler recalled that the ‘overwhelming preoccupation was
to avoid a collapse of confidence in Hong Kong’,35 where the markets had fallen badly in August. The situation was precarious.
Mrs Thatcher arrived in Peking, after a short visit to Tokyo, on 22 September. The journeys were particularly arduous because she had recently been in hospital for an operation on her varicose veins. The next day she met the Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang.* Just before heading into their meeting, Zhao told reporters that ‘China will certainly take back its sovereignty over Hong Kong.’36 This effort to pre-empt the issue publicly infuriated the British. ‘I realise that some of these points may be unwelcome. But I must be candid,’ Mrs Thatcher told Zhao. ‘Confidence in Hong Kong, and thus its continued prosperity, depend on British administration.’ Sovereignty was a difficult issue for her, she warned, because it was for Parliament, not her, to abrogate treaties. Abrogation alone would be ‘unthinkable’: ‘It would produce immediate panic in Hong Kong.’ What she wanted was an agreement with China which would define the new arrangements. If she were ‘satisfied that they … were acceptable to the people of Hong Kong … there would then be a new situation in which I could consider the question of sovereignty’.37 In reply, Zhao was polite, but firm. The capitalist system in Hong Kong would remain, but the return of sovereignty to China could not be delayed after 1997. If it came to a choice, sovereignty would take precedence over prosperity.
The following morning, Mrs Thatcher met Deng Xiaoping. Those present at the meeting were conscious of an air of unease and of two formidable individuals confronting one another. ‘They were mirror images,’ recalled Percy Cradock.38 Robin Butler remembered a ‘great diatribe’ by Deng, with Mrs Thatcher being ‘pretty equally aggressive’. While she spoke, Deng started hawking, and expectorating into the spittoon which was uncomfortably near to her: ‘She moved her legs. It threw her.’39 Once Deng had heard Mrs Thatcher repeat her points about sovereignty and confidence, he declared that if sovereignty over Hong Kong were not recovered ‘it would mean that the new China was like the China of the Ching Dynasty and the present leaders were like Li Hongzhang.’40 (In Chinese political myth, the Ching Dynasty was proverbial for its weakness in the face of foreigners, and its late nineteenth-century minister, Li Hongzhang, was considered the archetypal traitor.) Without recovered sovereignty, Deng said, his government ‘ought to retire voluntarily from the political arena’. Why should Britain not want to abandon its claim? Britain should be pleased to end its colonial era.