Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  For Mrs Thatcher to agree to the delegation was, in Charles Powell’s view, ‘a big concession’. She was, in effect, accepting that a senior British minister should meet the PLO, which she had always said would not happen. She did it for Hussein. Her romantic nature was engaged. ‘She had stars in her eyes about the gallant little king.’107 John Coles agreed, and indeed had intended this: ‘My main aim was that she should come to support the King.’ Hussein took Mrs Thatcher to the ancient, deserted city of Petra and flew her alone in his helicopter over the vast extent of the spectacular ruins, dipping into its rose-red ravines for forty minutes. ‘When she got out, she was white as a sheet,’ recalled Coles, but this contributed to her sense of excitement.108 In her letter of thanks to Coles afterwards, she told him that she and Denis ‘think that Jordan was quite the nicest tour we have ever made’.109 ‘If she hadn’t paid a visit to Jordan, I wonder if any of this would have happened,’ said Coles.110

  ‘Not welcome’ was the headline of the leading article in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun,111 which normally supported Mrs Thatcher ardently. Conservative Friends of Israel criticized her112 and so did Israel itself, both Peres and Shamir. In response Bernard Ingham, taking note of what he described as Mrs Thatcher’s ‘constituency interest’, encouraged her to give an interview to the Israeli press to ‘set out clearly for the Jewish reader, listener and viewer your case in your own terms’.113 The Americans were not pleased, although Richard Murphy himself ‘felt hopeful that it might work’.114 Events also conspired against her. Palestinian terrorists killed three Israelis in Cyprus and on 7 October the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) captured the cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered a disabled American Jewish passenger named Leon Klinghoffer. On 1 October, in reprisal for the Cyprus killings, the Israelis bombed the PLO headquarters, newly established in Tunis. Arafat escaped, but seventy-one people died. Charles Powell warned the Foreign Office that Mrs Thatcher was worried about exactly what the two Palestinians in the joint delegation would say when they arrived in London. He produced a text for them to adhere to. In a rare intervention, David Wolfson sent Powell a short note with background material which claimed to show that the two Palestinian delegation members were supporters of terrorism. He warned that if the government thought ‘Arafat’s “wing” ’ of the PLF had not been involved in the Achille Lauro attack, ‘we may well be proved very wrong. Or very naïve, or both. My main concern is no more egg on faces than necessary.’115

  Egg on faces was not completely avoided. ‘A major setback’, Powell informed Mrs Thatcher on 13 October. One of the two Palestinians (Mayor Mohammed Milhem), in London for the promised meeting, had now demanded the removal of any reference to Israel from his public remarks. ‘This is clearly completely unacceptable,’ Powell went on:116 the meeting would not now take place at all. Desperate efforts were made to inform King Hussein, who was staying on the estate of the Duke of Roxburghe in Scotland. If the meeting had gone ahead, he would have been well placed to enjoy a considerable triumph. ‘I am deeply disappointed,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote to him the next day.117 Her rather quixotic attempt to bring change in the Middle East had failed. In February of the following year, Hussein announced that he was giving up on the PLO altogether.

  Mrs Thatcher’s relations with the United States, or even with Israel, were not damaged in the long term by this adventure. Her goodwill was recognized. From this point onwards until the general election of 1987, her involvement in the search for a solution to the Arab–Israeli conflict was more limited. She did, however, visit Israel in May 1986 – also, as in Jordan, the first serving British prime minister to do so. Her motives, according to Charles Powell, were partly ‘to respond to pressure from the Jewish community, who were keen for her to go’,118 and partly to show her support for Peres.

  Arriving not long after she had given the United States permission to use British bases to bomb Libya in response to Colonel Gaddafi’s terrorism (see Chapter 15), Mrs Thatcher was warmly received. In her setpiece speech at dinner in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), however, she maintained her position on Palestine. She praised Israel’s ‘love of liberty and justice’, but turned this to serve her case: ‘Because of your own high standards, more is expected of Israel than of other countries, and that is why the world looks to Israel … A future in which two classes of people have to co-exist with different rights and different standards is surely not one which Israel can accept.’119 She also met Palestinian leaders – not PLO people; this was the first time that a Western leader had used a visit to Israel to do this.* She called for West Bank elections.

  None of this impaired relations with Peres, with whom she had four hours of talks. According to his adviser Nimrod Novik, his relationship with Mrs Thatcher ‘was unique since the discussions with her were more intimate than those she held with Kohl, Mitterrand or anyone else’.120 Charles Powell had a similar impression: ‘I have a happy memory of driving back with her from the Negev towards Tel Aviv … with her and Peres on the back seat. They gradually fell asleep with her head resting on his shoulder. It was rather touching.’121 William Squire, the British Ambassador to Israel, cabled the Foreign Office in almost ecstatic terms: the warmth of Mrs Thatcher’s welcome from the public had been a ‘personal triumph’. ‘The emotion that the Prime Minister displayed on the first morning at the visit to the Holocaust Memorial and to the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery struck a real chord.’ Israelis believed her to be ‘a bona fide interlocutor’, he said, and, thanks to her, had got over the long-standing ‘psychological hump’ caused by her ill feeling over the period of the Mandate. Anglo-Israeli relations were at ‘an all-time high’.122 For someone known for taking strong positions, Mrs Thatcher was skilful in not being exclusively identified with one Middle East faction. Shortly before the 1987 election was called, Charles Powell wrote to the Foreign Office rebuking it for trying to support a new initiative by the UN Secretary-General and considering joint action with the French. Nothing should be done to ‘lose us the carefully balanced position which we have created over the last two years or so, as a result of which she stands quite well with both sides’.123 Mrs Thatcher knew her power in the region was marginal; on the whole she used it astutely. This was an area where her growing global, personal prestige counted for more than the conventional assertion of British interests.

  The other factor which weighed heavily with Mrs Thatcher in her dealings with the Arab and Muslim world was British trade, particularly sales of defence equipment. She was the most tireless saleswoman for British companies. ‘Tell Treasury & Defence not to argue – just go and get the contract’ was a typical injunction scrawled on a letter about sales to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).124 Customers, actual or potential, included allies like Jordan (which, not being an oil state, had little money), Egypt, the mostly rich Gulf states (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Oman) with all of which Britain had historic connections, and then, much more problematically, Iraq and Iran (which were fighting each other) and Syria.* Following the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Britain had frozen its limited arms sales to Israel. By far the largest player in the market was Saudi Arabia.

  Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to these matters was simple, arguably simplistic. Her view was that if countries wanted to be armed, better that they should be armed by the British. Then they would have better relationships with Britain and create more British jobs. This rule could apply even to potentially hostile countries: how did it help Britain if they were dependent for weapons on the Soviet Union? She also well understood that, in the Arab world, where personal relationships were much more important than bureaucratic ones, the sales impact of a dynamic prime minister cultivating the rulers could be mighty. She counter-intuited that her sex, far from being a disadvantage in the completely male-dominated Arab world, helped her: it made her an object of fascination. She suffered from none of the traditional ruling-class British embarrassment about selling things hard. Her papers are stuffed with correspondence and records of meetings in which she
tries, often successfully, to sell kit to Arab potentates.

  Although, geo-politically, Mrs Thatcher was worried about Soviet influence, what personally upset her more was when Western allies, particularly the French, did better in Middle Eastern markets than Britain. In 1980, the junior defence minister, Geoffrey Pattie,* sent her privately an internal MOD report about French defence sales in the region. It quoted from an encounter between the Head of Defence Sales and a potential customer in the Gulf the previous year. ‘When we were poor’, the sheikh had told him, ‘you were here; you even taught us English so that we could understand you. Now we are rich, we never see you, and we are having to learn French.’125 Mrs Thatcher scratched dark lines of emphasis beside this quotation.

  The biggest British pitch was to Saudi Arabia. In February 1981, the relevant Cabinet committee (OD) had agreed in principle that Britain should sell Tornado combat aircraft – which British Aerospace (BAe) had developed with the Germans and the Italians – to overseas customers. At first, sales efforts centred on Jordan, but these failed. By September 1983, the MOD told Mrs Thatcher it was ready for the greater prize of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were interested because they feared attack from Iran and wanted the necessary ‘punch’ to repel it.126 The Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, asked Mrs Thatcher if they could go ahead. ‘Agreed,’ she wrote, ‘and hope we succeed.’127 In his memoirs, Heseltine confines his description of Mrs Thatcher’s role in the search for this deal to one sentence: ‘Mrs Thatcher played her part in the process.’128 That is one of the greater understatements of history.

  The MOD thought it would probably win the Tornado sale. In the autumn of 1983, Heseltine attended a dinner given by Jonathan Aitken† for the former US President Richard Nixon. Aitken seated Heseltine next to Wafic Saïd,‡ the Syrian-born homme d’affaires for many of the Saudi royal family’s business dealings. ‘ “I’ve just been to Saudi,” Heseltine told me,’ Saïd recalled. ‘ “We’re securing a project there very soon.” I knew from the grapevine that Prince Sultan was in negotiation with the French and wasn’t so sure. I told him, “I very much advise you not to take it for granted.” He looked at me as if to say, “Who are you?” ’129 But not long afterwards Saïd was contacted by James Blyth,* the Head of Defence Sales at the MOD, who asked to see him. Saïd knew that Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defence Minister, favoured the French and that discussions were in progress. This news ‘took us by surprise’, recalled Clive Whitmore,† the Permanent Secretary at the MOD.130 Saïd subsequently consulted his close friend Prince Bandar,‡ the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, who confirmed that a deal for his country to buy Mirage 2000s from the French was well advanced. Despite being the son of Prince Sultan, Bandar was not in favour of the sale, which he told Saïd was ‘mad’.131 He preferred the British. Back in London, Saïd reported this to Blyth, who had brought Richard Evans§ of BAe with him. Alarmed, Evans arranged for Saïd to meet Mrs Thatcher informally. Saïd told her that the Saudi government was inclined to go for the French Mirages. She was ‘very angry’ at the French advance. ‘Have the Saudis misled me?’ she asked Saïd, and reminded him of how Britain had supplied Saudi Arabia with Lightnings in 1959 and taught the Royal Saudi Air Force how to use them: ‘We trained your pilots, Mr Saïd. This is our key national interest. For your country, it is a matter of trust: we will prove a loyal ally.’132 Saïd advised Mrs Thatcher that she should discuss the matter with Prince Bandar. As soon as Heseltine heard the news that ‘the French were much further advanced than we had known, he announced, “We’ll go to Saudi this weekend, and put things right.” ’133 When he flew to Riyadh, he carried with him a letter from Mrs Thatcher for King Fahd encouraging the sale. In the whole saga of the deal, despite the bitter falling-out which led to Heseltine’s resignation over Westland in January 1986, his relations with Mrs Thatcher on this matter were ‘completely harmonious’.134 But although Heseltine was dynamic in pursuing the contract, ultimately the MOD ‘depended a great deal on her’.135 The process of negotiation was immensely long and complicated, and the Saudis expected engagement at the highest level.

  Prince Bandar was an exceptional character. He was the son of Prince Sultan, but born of an unmarried African mother who had been a maid in the royal palace. For that reason, Bandar was looked down on by other members of the Saudi royal family. Until the age of eight, he was brought up without regular contact with his father. So great were his own abilities and drive, however, that, despite the gerontocratic customs of the House of Saud, he was made ambassador to Washington at the age of only thirty-four. He was also a trained pilot with a particular interest in military aircraft. He had perfected his flying skills at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire – the base, by chance, with whose pilots the young Margaret had danced during the war. His flying career was cut short by a car-crash: ‘He was a light-hearted young man. He used to tell us “I’m just a retired injured fighter-pilot,” ’ recalled James Blyth.136 Unlike his francophile father, Bandar was also extremely pro-British. He had little time for the French, who he felt were ‘all like Inspector Clouseau’.137

  There was also a generational difference: ‘Sultan was oldish, inscrutable, not obviously accessible to us. Bandar was open and Westernized, so we cultivated him.’138 As an expert on aircraft, he believed that the Tornado, ‘with its longer range and heavier payload’,139 was superior to the Mirage. As a rising figure in Saudi court politics, he knew that it would improve his influence if Saudi Arabia were to buy British rather than French. He also saw the matter strategically. He considered that there was a ‘trilateral relationship – not just a bilateral one between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Reagan, King Fahd and Mrs Thatcher had an informal meeting of the heart and agreement on the strategic outlook. We were all fighting Communism together.’140 He was also conscious that Fahd, four years Mrs Thatcher’s senior, considered her a very beautiful woman and, for that reason as well, the King was keen to do business with her.141

  The young Prince was in a delicate position because of his father Sultan’s views, but he was aware that King Fahd, who had come to the throne two years earlier, felt resentful of the total power over defence issues which Prince Sultan had been given by his predecessor, King Khaled. Fahd wished to wrest control of defence from Sultan, and Bandar saw a way to help him do this. He knew that Fahd had no personal love for the French.* At same time, because of his position in Washington, Bandar had a better understanding of American attitudes than any other Saudi. Indeed, he had been put there because King Fahd, who was strongly pro-American, wanted him to get as close to the Reagan administration as possible. Bandar knew that Congress, because of its support for Israel, was likely to block the sale of American F-15 Strike fighters to Saudi Arabia. In Bandar’s view, the purchase of French Mirages depended on the F-15 Strike deal, because the combination of the two planes would give Saudi ‘the right low–high airforce structure’.142 Once the American option was removed from the equation, the French chances would fade and the British opportunity grow.

  Bandar went to see Mrs Thatcher for the first time in December 1984. She was impressed by the energetic and handsome young Prince,143 who had ‘lots of charm and dash’.144 He was equally taken by the blonde stateswoman. Mrs Thatcher insisted on meeting Bandar at the door of No. 10 and curtsied to him: ‘I thought she’d slipped.’145 But her deference to his royal blood did not make her servile: ‘She had such a powerful personality. She liked to give you a taste of it, to help you get to know her. She was a hell of a man!’ At the end of the conversation, Mrs Thatcher insisted on bringing Prince Bandar down to be photographed with her beside the No. 10 Christmas tree. Bandar presented her with a rock-crystal model of a bulldog with sapphire eyes in recognition, he told her, of the British fighting spirit. After she had said goodbye to him, she said to James Blyth, who had been in the wings, ‘Isn’t that a lovely present!’ ‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ said Blyth, ‘but unfortunately that’s a French bulldog.’ ‘If he buys aeroplanes from us, I don’t care where he buys his
bulldogs,’ Mrs Thatcher exclaimed.146

  It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. While in office, Mrs Thatcher had twenty-three meetings with Bandar, probably more than any other foreigner (apart from the US Ambassador, Charlie Price) who was not a head of government. Their diplomacy was almost completely private. In most cases, ‘to the rage of the Foreign Office’, the only other person present was Charles Powell.147 With Bandar’s encouragement, Mrs Thatcher started to write personal letters to King Fahd, often more than once a month, commenting on world events and Middle Eastern affairs and reporting to him her conversations with world leaders. Sometimes, Bandar himself would carry these messages by hand.*

  In their first encounter, and in a longer meeting in early January, Mrs Thatcher and Bandar discussed the prospects for the Tornado purchases, and debated tactics. By Bandar’s account, he informed her of President Reagan’s view that Congress would want to block the sale of F-15s to his country. ‘She was so sharp: she was thinking all the time.’148 She suggested that she herself should lobby Reagan to go ahead with the sale and also ask his agreement for her to lobby Congress for the same result, knowing that this would not work and the F-15s would be blocked: ‘Then I will say to the Congressmen that contracts must not go to the Soviet Union or China [with which Saudi Arabia was threatening to trade], but to us.’ She greedily sucked up all information which Bandar had about what Saudi might want: ‘Give me the numbers. And? And? And?’149

  Invigorated by his Thatcher meetings, Bandar argued the British case to King Fahd. Both the Mirage and the Tornado are ‘good aircraft’, he argued, ‘but the important question, Your Majesty, is, “Who do you trust – Mitterrand or Mrs Thatcher?” “Mrs Thatcher,” he said. “Well,” I said, “that solves the problem.” ’150 Fahd agreed that Saudi Arabia would now negotiate with Britain for the Tornadoes. Mrs Thatcher met Bandar once more, on 18 February 1985, just before she flew to Washington to see President Reagan. After her visit, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Fahd. She told him that Bandar had informed her about the King’s recent talks with Reagan. She added, artfully: ‘I left the President in no doubt of my concern about the situation in the Middle East. I raised the subject by referring to the importance of the joint communiqué you issued after your visit to Washington and said that Britain supported it.’151 Mrs Thatcher was also aware, thanks in part to Bandar, that Reagan himself was on her side. If Congress would not let him sell his own country’s aircraft to Saudi Arabia, he would much rather Mrs Thatcher should get the benefit than François Mitterrand. Reagan privately advised King Fahd to buy British.*