At the end of March, Bandar rang Mrs Thatcher to pass on an invitation from King Fahd. Since she would soon be passing his way on her return from a visit to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India, please would she drop in on Riyadh for dinner on the way home? She duly agreed to join the King on 15 April. Robin Butler, who accompanied her, remembered the occasion with pain, because ‘Fahd talked and talked and talked way beyond the scheduled time’ and her exhausted entourage were all desperate to get on with their flight.152 But the dinner was worth while for Mrs Thatcher. In the course of it, King Fahd turned to her and said, ‘Prime Minister, the deal is yours.’153
The details were as laborious as the deal itself. It was a question whether BAe, which already had heavy commitments supplying Tornadoes to the RAF, would be able to produce the aircraft required in time and in the number that Saudi Arabia wanted. Mrs Thatcher was so determined to do this that she ordered the first aeroplanes to be taken out of the queue intended for the RAF and sent quickly to Saudi Arabia.*
In August, Bandar wanted to see Mrs Thatcher. She was on holiday, but agreed to meet him in Salzburg, just before she returned to England. Bandar told her that King Fahd wanted forty-eight Tornado IDS (interdictor/strike) aircraft, thirty Hawk fast-jet trainers, thirty Pilatus PC-9 training planes and an ongoing programme of technical training. Prince Sultan, calling with Bandar on Mrs Thatcher at the end of September, confirmed the agreement, which was formally signed by Michael Heseltine. The knowledge that this deal would be forthcoming probably helped Mrs Thatcher to act as boldly as she did in relation to Hussein’s Jordanian–Palestinian initiative. She knew she stood high with non-militant Arabs, and had some advantage over the Americans because of this. The contract was initially worth £5.2 billion, but provided for its own renewal and for associated services in the future, including construction. It assured the future of BAe’s facility at Warton in Lancashire and the capability of BAe eventually to produce the Eurofighter. A second stage of the contract was signed in October 1987. Over more than twenty years, the deal is estimated to have amounted to £42 billion.† There were also various ‘off-set’ British–Saudi joint ventures in projects in the kingdom. It was, judged James Blyth, ‘the biggest single deal anybody has ever done for the United Kingdom. It was Mrs Thatcher who pulled the mutton over the threshold so far as the King was concerned.’154
At his meeting with Mrs Thatcher, Prince Sultan told her that King Fahd had wanted the contract because of his ‘great respect for the Prime Minister’: the deal should be seen not only materially, but as a contribution to ‘peace and stability’.155 He congratulated her on her initiative with King Hussein: the prospect of a Jordanian–Palestinian meeting in London had been ‘very well received in the Arab world’. In January of the following year, the commercial terms were settled and the contract was given a name – Al-Yamamah, the Arabic for a dove (of peace). The first Tornadoes were delivered in March. In May 1986, Mrs Thatcher felt able to write and thank King Fahd for his ‘deep personal interest’ in the deal.156
Mrs Thatcher had now established for Britain a relationship both of trust and of profit with the most important oil state. It would greatly assist her future contacts in all sorts of international diplomacy, and prove important in the Gulf War at the end of the decade. Al-Yamamah helped confirm the unique salience in world affairs which she had now achieved. In Prince Bandar’s view, ‘Before her, no one really cared what Britain thought or did. In her time, all over the world, they asked: “What does Thatcher think? Where will Britain be?” ’157
Given the scale of her achievement, of which Mrs Thatcher was proud, it might seem surprising that, both then and later, she said almost nothing about it. Her memoirs make no mention whatever of Al-Yamamah or of Tornadoes. They devote three pages to her visit to Malaysia, Sri Lanka and so on in March–April 1985, but are silent about her visit to Riyadh on the same trip.* There are two probable reasons for this. The first is the extreme discretion Mrs Thatcher always exercised in relation to matters like intelligence, defence equipment and personal diplomacy. Her creed of loyalty put great emphasis on trust, and she knew that Saudi culture felt the same way: boasting would have been dangerous to the relationship and have created controversy at home.† The second reason was more difficult for her. It was to do with her son.
Mark Thatcher was often accused of seeking to profit from his mother’s position. In principle, this was not something Mrs Thatcher condoned. On one occasion, Carol recalled, ‘she gave us both a little lecture about freebies. She was very against cashing in.’158 But the issue was not always so black and white. It arose with particular virulence in 1984 when the Observer newspaper revealed, rather belatedly, that Mark had been involved in a contract to build a university in Oman in 1981. The circumstances, the paper alleged, had been scandalous.159
In November 1980, Mrs Thatcher, unwisely and unbeknown to her principal private secretary,160 gave her son, then aged twenty-seven, a handwritten letter of introduction to Sheikh Zayed,* the President of the United Arab Emirates.161 Through the sheikh, Mark was employed in Abu Dhabi by a company called Galadari. His work for Galadari was not in itself controversial, but Zayed’s role in his advancement aroused criticism. At the same time, Mark also benefited from Mrs Thatcher’s close acquaintance with Lord (Victor) Matthews,† chairman of the Daily Express and group managing director of the British construction, property and engineering conglomerate Trafalgar House. He acquired a consultancy with Cementation International, Trafalgar House’s subsidiary in the Arab world. Through Zayed’s recommendation and because of whose son he was, Mark was granted an audience with the pro-British Sultan Qaboos‡ of Oman. From this introduction, Mark was eventually able to lobby for Cementation to be given the contract to build the new university in Oman.
In April 1981, Mrs Thatcher went on a trade mission to India, accompanied by Denis and by Carol, who came along for the fun. The trip included a visit to Abu Dhabi, where Mark was working. There, apparently without warning, he joined his mother for a party. She went thence, via Dubai, to Muscat, the capital of Oman, where Mark was also already working. Again, he joined her. ‘Bloody Mark has turned up,’ said Carol as she sat beside the swimming pool with Tim Lankester, Mrs Thatcher’s Treasury private secretary.162 Because Mark had arrived separately, he managed completely to evade the attention of the press, who did not know he was in the country. There was consternation among the private secretaries, who feared that he was there to advance his commercial interests via his mother. Earlier, hearing that Mark was likely to join them in Muscat, Michael Alexander, then her foreign affairs private secretary, had seen Mrs Thatcher privately and remonstrated with her about Mark’s presence, but ‘She blew him off. He came out very annoyed.’163 In September of the same year, the government of Oman awarded the construction contract to Cementation. The other bidders complained that they had not been given a fair chance.
The accusation was that Mrs Thatcher had used her influence with the Sultan to get the contract for the firm for which Mark was working. Following up the Observer’s story, in March 1984 the Sunday Times, using subterfuge, got Mark’s bank details and revealed that Denis Thatcher was a co-signatory to one of Mark’s accounts. The paper implied that Denis was also profiting from Cementation. ‘Denis shares Mark’s Oman account’ was the headline.164 Although the story about Denis did not really go anywhere,* the two combined presented Mrs Thatcher with considerable difficulties, which went on for months.
The Observer story was not easy to shrug off because it came in part from the ranks of officialdom. Mark’s actions had ruffled many a feather in the British Embassy in Oman, and Ivor Lucas, the Ambassador, had warned Whitehall that his presence was ‘a potential embarrassment’.165 This unease had only grown when, without warning, Mark had arrived to join Mrs Thatcher, Denis, Carol and others for a private lunch at the Sultan’s perfume-filled Salalah summer palace on the beach, 700 miles from the capital. After lunch, Mrs Thatcher retired for a pr
ivate tête-à-tête with the Sultan. In the course of this, as she said publicly after the Observer story broke, ‘I was advised to raise the matter of the whole university contract with the government of Oman. I did it. I believed in it very forcefully because I wanted the business to come to Britain.’166 She did not distinguish between British companies, she said: ‘I bat for Britain.’167†
The Observer story was not a knock-down blow. No iniquity was proved. Mark Thatcher insisted he was doing nothing wrong: ‘So what? I was at least working for a UK company. Dad always told me to take care only to work for UK companies. Would those who sought to criticize this have preferred me to work for a German or Cypriot company? In such a case there would have been more criticism, of course, and rightly so. It was a no-win situation. At least I was working for the benefit of the UK economy.’168 He turned down the chance of working in the Sultan of Oman’s palace office, preferring his work in the UAE.169 It is true, however, that Mark had close links to Brigadier Tim Landon,* the Sultan’s closest confidant, who sometimes came with Mark to see Mrs Thatcher at Chequers. Mark once also brought Landon to lunch with her when she was on holiday in Austria in August 1985. Such connections were bound to make people suspect abuse of his mother’s position. Mrs Thatcher’s private office tried unsuccessfully to convey to Mrs Thatcher the risks involved. ‘She really didn’t understand conflicts of interest’, recalled Tim Lankester, ‘if they came under her category of batting for Britain.’170
Clive Whitmore, Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary from 1979 to 1982, did not travel on the Oman trip. But he did quite often have to deal with problems of Mark ‘trying to exploit his mother’s name’, particularly in the Middle East, ‘where family and government is usually muddled up, and therefore the son was seen as the extension of the mother. Mark was not slow to take advantage of this.’171 On one occasion, the chairman of BP came to see him, threatening to go public with a statement that Mark’s activities with oil deals were endangering the company’s established relationships. Whitmore took the matter to Mrs Thatcher: ‘I told her. She said, “Would you see him?” I did. I said: “You cannot damage the reputation of your mother. It’s got to stop.” Mark accepted this.’172 The problem recurred in different forms, and with different enterprises, however, because, Whitmore believed, ‘Mark was driven by greed and reluctant to pass up any opportunity.’ A pattern developed in which Mrs Thatcher had ‘an air of resignation about it all, but was indulgent towards Mark. The rational PM knew well what he was up to. But the mother found it difficult to be tough with him.’173 She felt guilty both about not having had enough time for her children and because, as she saw it, her job made it harder, not easier, for Mark to pursue a business career. Mark disagreed: ‘I never thought my mother’s career impeded my own in any way.’174 But the whole subject made her tense and irresolute. Mark himself considered that Mrs Thatcher ‘felt her maternal instinct with the same fervour as she deployed her political arguments’.175 This was true, but she was much less adroit in working out how to act upon her maternal instinct successfully. Sometimes she would pass the task of reprimand to Denis, who would exclaim, ‘The bloody young fool!’176 ‘Denis did his best,’ thought Whitmore, but was no more successful than Mrs Thatcher.
Robin Butler, Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary when the Cementation story broke in the Observer, was still more severe. He thought that Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour in Oman ‘had conveyed a whiff of corruption, though she might not have regarded it as such. She had wanted to see Mark right. She sought the deal for Mark. She excluded everyone from her talks with the Sultan. Mark was dealing with Brigadier Landon who was the Sultan’s go-between. She behaved in a most peculiar way. I suspected the worst.’177 Nigel Wicks,* who succeeded Butler as principal private secretary in 1985, also had to deal with problems over Mark, and eventually told him that he should stop working in business ‘because I was damaging my mother’s interest’.178 Mark did not believe that Mrs Thatcher knew of Wicks’s approach: ‘I am sure she would have raised it with me if she’d been concerned.’
When the nature and dimensions of the Al-Yamamah deal gradually emerged, allegations against Mark Thatcher began again. In their 1995 book, Paul Halloran and Mark Hollingsworth claimed that Wafic Saïd used Mark as a conduit to his mother, and suggested that Saïd had some sort of financial relationship with him, possibly helping him buy a house, for example.179 Saïd always categorically denied this,180 and indeed it is not easy to see what access Mark could have brought him that he did not have by other means. He had a good relationship with Charles Powell, who was to work for him in the 1990s, and he used frequently to lunch with Denis at the Connaught Hotel when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister: both men had daily contact with Mrs Thatcher, more than Mark did. Prince Bandar also denied that Mark had anything to do with Al-Yamamah and said that he had met him only twice.181 Saïd believed that Denis played ‘a fantastic, patriotic role’ and kept his son at a distance from the deal.182 Mark denied, almost wistfully, that he got money out of the contract: ‘If I had been involved in it, I wouldn’t be sitting here.’183 One source close to the family considered that Mark was ‘buzzing around’ Al-Yamamah, looking for money, but did not get any. It was thought possible that Mark had been retained by powerful Saudis not to pursue any specific interest but just ‘to keep in with the Thatchers’.184
In summary, no wrong was proved against Mark in relation to Al-Yamamah, but it is also clear that there was pervasive unease about the son’s business dealings in areas where the mother’s influence was high and about her reluctance to do anything decisive about the issue. What can also be said is that her Saudi friends remained loyal to her. In her retirement, Wafic Saïd gave her free use of the Clock House on his estate in Oxfordshire, where she used to go to rest. Saïd also employed Bob Kingston, one of her most faithful detectives when she was in office, as the head of security on Prince Bandar’s nearby Glympton estate which he managed. And when, in 2005, Mark was convicted in South Africa for helping plot an unsuccessful coup against the government of Equatorial Guinea, Prince Bandar, who was a friend and supporter of Nelson Mandela, interceded informally with the South African government on Mark’s behalf. Mark was permitted, on payment of a fine, to leave the country.185 Bandar’s involvement probably did not alter the rulings of the South African justice system, but it was evidence of his ongoing concern for Mrs Thatcher.
To be fair to Mark – which few were inclined to be – any attempt by him to pursue a business career was constantly harassed by a hostile press. In the early 1980s, when he was Mrs Thatcher’s only child in Britain (because Carol was working in Australia), he was the object of much media attention. In addition, he had a problem of security. At the time of the 1981 hunger strikes, it was secretly reported that the IRA were contemplating kidnapping him in Britain and then starving him to death. From then on he was given permanent protection. The costs of altering the house in Flood Street (where the Thatchers lived before she entered Downing Street in May 1979) to make it secure were considered too high, and it was deemed safer for Mark to live in No. 10 Downing Street.* This had a somewhat imprisoning effect. Mark recalled: ‘I was happy to make the move for the greater good, but it inevitably drew more attention to my life. Some people complained it was a benefit to me, but really it was a sacrifice.’186 He was criticized for self-aggrandizement when he gave 10 Downing Street as his home address, and yet he was not really permitted to live anywhere else.
After the Cementation story in 1984, it was decided that it would be best for all concerned if Mark were to leave the country. It was Denis who advised this, and suggested his son go to the United States, where he had a work permit, and employment offers that arose through his father’s connections, not his mother’s. ‘I would have preferred to stay in England,’ Mark recalled, and the whole thing was ‘extraordinarily painful for my mother’,187 but it happened. Mark left Britain towards the end of 1984, and based himself in Dallas, Texas.
Probl
ems about Mark’s security almost immediately cropped up. Irish American Voice, the paper of IRA sympathizers in the United States, published his rough whereabouts. His mother was naturally upset. ‘It is his flat that I am most worried about,’ she wrote to her private office. ‘There is no back way out and no means of getting help.’188 The exacting duty of looking after Mark fell to John Kerr, the Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Washington. Kerr quickly came to the view that Mark felt he was ‘entitled to have protection officers with him at all times, probably primarily to book tables in restaurants’.189 Care of Mark was complicated. ‘One of the problems with Mr Thatcher’, wrote an official from the British Consulate in Dallas, ‘is that he does not let anyone know about his movements.’190 Kerr represented to the American authorities that Mark’s security was necessary not only in itself (though the risk was not judged high), but ‘for Mrs Thatcher’s peace of mind – and therefore in the interests of the alliance’.191 Mark was assured by Charlie Wick, former Director of the US Information Agency and a close associate of President Reagan, that ‘The President is never going to allow himself to be put in a situation where he has to telephone your mother to say that her son has been injured on US soil.’192 So both the American and British authorities shared the burden.
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