Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  It was quite heavy work. One State Department official wrote drily to a colleague that Mark’s sports car, ‘a bright red Lotus [part of Mark’s work was to promote the Lotus brand] was hardly the type of vehicle required to preserve or promote anonymity’.193 Letters flew back and forth complaining how hard it was to find Mark, especially when there were complications in his love life, and how rude he was when he was found. Mandarin phrases like ‘not altogether satisfactory’ and ‘silence reigns’ conveyed the flavour of disgruntled officialdom.

  After the American bombing of Libya from British air bases in April 1986, Mrs Thatcher became alarmed once more. ‘Nigel,’ she wrote to Wicks, ‘… after yesterday’s terrible news [three employees of the American University of Beirut – two British and one American – had been murdered by Islamic terrorists in retaliation for the US attacks on Tripoli], I fear he may be a priority target – and so may Carol … he is alone in the flat.’ He was going to stay with the Annenbergs that weekend,* she went on: ‘I thought the security people over there would automatically [underlined three times] think of giving him special protection but nothing has happened.’ Then she turned to her daughter: ‘Fortunately Carol has alarms in her house but I will ask my detectives if they can arrange for the local police to be especially watchful during the coming weeks. I will also remind her to watch her car for explosives. Indeed it may be best to keep it parked outside No. 10 for the time being.’194

  This letter was expressive not only of a mother’s natural concern, but of guilt. Mrs Thatcher was conscious that her policies had increased the risk to her children. This feeling was probably stronger in her than it would have been in the more compartmentalized mind of a typical male political leader. Perhaps sensing this, Nigel Wicks wrote back immediately with particular solicitude. He reassured Mrs Thatcher that, once returned from the Annenbergs, Mark would have security men with him at all times, and added: ‘Please, please let me know at any time of day or night if you think there is anything more that we can do to help you.’195 Despite Wicks’s efforts on Mrs Thatcher’s behalf, however, Carol asserted her independence and steadfastly refused personal protection, though the security of her house was improved. She was following the example of her father, who declined to have permanent protection throughout the nearly thirty years of his life that it was accorded to his wife.

  There was still trouble about Mark. Some of the neighbours in his apartment block complained about the disruption caused by his level of security, and also, to the rage of the more pro-British residents, wanted Mark out of the block for the sake of their own safety. Mark was asked to leave his apartment, and this was widely reported. For a while he took refuge with the Perots,* but reports came to the British Embassy from the US Chief of Protocol that all was not well in the Perot household: ‘she formed the impression that he was exploiting his position there and that the Perots would be greatly relieved if and when he moved out in July to the new house. She feared there was a risk of a non-terrorist explosion!’196 It was essential, said Kerr, that a new home be found for Mark quickly: ‘one well-publicised eviction is excusable, but two might provoke comment from the Lady Bracknells, not to mention the Fleet St newshounds.’ All through the summer, there was wrangling about Mark’s accommodation. ‘I think all concerned, possibly including the Prime Minister, ought to be explaining to Mark that he simply must choose his permanent Dallas home,’ noted Kerr. ‘We shall do that as soon as we can get hold of him …’197

  Then there was the question of money. Who would pay for Mark’s security? The Cabinet Office would not contribute unless Mark had permanent accommodation, as Wicks, not wanting to bother Mrs Thatcher, explained to Denis (‘if there is anything you can do to encourage him in his search … that would be very helpful’).198 And the State Department threatened to drop his protective detail. Mark was reluctant to settle down, however, because he calculated that Dallas property prices were falling and so it would be better to buy later.199 Denis sympathized with Mark about property prices, but not about protection. If the authorities withdrew protection in Dallas ‘we should not object,’ Denis said. He told Wicks, who reported this to Mrs Thatcher herself, that he thought there would be an outcry if British public funds were used to make their son’s home more secure.200 An agitated Mrs Thatcher asked to speak to Mark on a secure line about this. This was not possible in Dallas, however, and so the message was conveyed to Mark by the Embassy that his protection would be withdrawn. But Mrs Thatcher insisted that the withdrawal should not be abrupt.201 So Mark was put on notice, but not, in fact, left unprotected.

  It was not until December that Mark finally decided to get a house of his own in Dallas. He sought government money to have it made secure. He told Wicks that he thought this would cost $25,000,202 causing Mrs Thatcher to write, ‘May I first have a realistic estimate? The sums seem enormous – way beyond what I could reimburse.’ A survey was duly conducted and a British Embassy official reported from the scene:

  Mr Thatcher [Mark] was present for the survey and his attitude was that the exercise should be done properly or not at all. At one point when I raised a query on the specifications for the proposed safe haven he remarked that if I was adopting that attitude I might as well get on the next plane back to Washington … In Mr Thatcher’s view there would be no difficulty in obtaining the necessary funds – he added that £160,000 had recently been spent on the Prime Minister’s house.203

  In the end, the cost was estimated at $61,618, and the Cabinet Office felt, despite Denis’s anxieties, that it could bear the cost up to $30,820. ‘I gratefully accept the Cabinet Office proposal,’ wrote Mrs Thatcher. ‘Mark’s security is endangered because of my actions as Prime Minister and these safeguards are I believe justified.’204 After this, things calmed down. In the following month, Mark married his Texan girlfriend Diane Burgdorf at the Savoy Chapel in London, a pre-wedding party having been given in their honour by Denis and Margaret at 10 Downing Street. The couple spent their honeymoon in Australia, where they travelled under the name of ‘Mr and Mrs Green’,205 and were given personal protection.

  Mark had experienced genuine difficulty, because risk did exist and he was effectively forbidden to live in Britain, but, as John Kerr remembered, ‘He was jolly hard to help.’206 Mrs Thatcher found this too. The supremely powerful, decisive and determined Prime Minister, courted by the great statesmen of the world, could never quite work out how to deal with her son.

  10

  Irish Agreement, Brighton bomb

  ‘The day I was not meant to see’

  When he heard that he would become prime minister for the first time, in 1868, William Gladstone said, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ Mrs Thatcher never entertained such a grandiose idea. For her, the subject of Northern Ireland was always a distraction from her great task of restoring British economic liberty and success. It did engage her passions, however, because she was instinctively protective of anything and anyone who, as she saw it, was assailed for being British. She felt especially emotional about the fact that hundreds of British soldiers and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) were killed and injured in terrorist attacks, mainly committed by the IRA. She was determined to fight terrorism and was acutely aware of the threat to her own life (and the lives of her friends) presented by Irish Republican terrorists. In the view of politicians from Northern Ireland, Mrs Thatcher was well briefed on the affairs of the province but she had little ‘feel’ for the problem.1 She had no personal vision of how Northern Ireland could be governed more successfully.*

  In her first term as prime minister, Mrs Thatcher had bravely faced down international anger in her resistance to the IRA hunger strikes (see Volume I, Chapter 21), but no political initiative in Northern Ireland had borne fruit. Enraged by the mischief, even malice, displayed by Charles Haughey’s† government in Dublin during the Falklands War, she had frozen the rather tentative connections between the British and Irish governments. While privately telling officials
that she wanted to ‘do something about Ireland’, she had no idea of her own what that ‘something’ might be, and no machinery of her own to develop the appropriate ideas. Initiatives came from the most pro-Nationalist officials in the Whitehall machine, notably the Foreign Office, whose standing in her eyes, after the debacle of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, was low. ‘People would speak to me of the necessity of having an initiative, and I would say “What?”,’ she recalled,2 as if expecting no useful suggestion to follow.

  It was in this state of angry immobility that Anglo-Irish relations stood when Garret FitzGerald* became taoiseach† (prime minister) of the Irish Republic for the second time in December 1982. FitzGerald was keen, despite the difficulties, to resume progress towards a settlement between Britain and the Republic over the question of Northern Ireland. One of his officials set out the situation bluntly:

  Anglo-Irish relations have been very bad since May last. The differences over the Falklands … confirmed the British Prime Minister in her feeling that she should have followed her personal instincts and natural supporters in the Tory party and been much more cautious in her involvement in Anglo-Irish approaches … Her distrust of the Foreign Office … will not promote a favourable attitude to the resumption of the Anglo-Irish process.3

  The official recommended a security-led approach to the problem. The Irish government should ‘strike hard at the terrorists’ – ‘tougher action would be welcome to the British Government and would help to lay the basis for a resumption of an Anglo-Irish process.’4

  This was a good reading of Mrs Thatcher’s state of mind. For her, security came first, and she was perpetually and often justifiably dissatisfied with the Republic’s contribution to it. From time to time, she would put forward the idea of a fence, built all along the border, with what she called an ‘access corridor’.5 No colleagues ever gave countenance to her notion, but it frequently recurred. In private conversation, Mrs Thatcher was particularly preoccupied by what she considered the inglorious role of the Republic of Ireland in the Second World War. ‘The Irish were worse than neutral,’ she said6 – their formal neutrality had effectively given comfort to the Germans.*

  In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher was rather unkind about Garret FitzGerald, making sarcastic remarks about his loquacity and inability to understand Unionist fears. She compared him unfavourably to Charlie Haughey, saying privately that ‘Haughey was a tough guy … often it is easier to deal with a tough guy.’7† This was not how she felt about FitzGerald when she was in office. It was true that she considered him ‘a man of many words’,8 a significant proportion of which she could not hear because of his quiet voice and rapid flow.‡ She remembered him as an ‘Irish Geoffrey Howe’.9 One of FitzGerald’s officials recalled that ‘before each meeting with Mrs Thatcher, I’d urge him to “speak slowly, speak slowly” … he’d start quite slowly and intelligibly, but then the ideas started to crowd in and he’d speed up. He couldn’t vocalize his thoughts quickly enough.’10 On one occasion, she fell asleep in his company.§ But her published complaints probably reflect her retrospective sense of unease about the whole Anglo-Irish process. At the time, Mrs Thatcher did recognize that FitzGerald was not anti-British, and was genuine in his desire for better relations between the two countries and for peace in Northern Ireland. FitzGerald’s sincerity commanded her respect. ‘He was very easy to get on with,’ she recalled.11 ‘He did have a wider view.’ Robert Armstrong, who led the British side of the negotiations for an Anglo-Irish agreement throughout, noted: ‘She liked FitzGerald and thought he was an honest, decent man. I think she felt motherly towards him: she wanted to stroke his curly hair.’12¶ Mrs Thatcher believed that she owed FitzGerald a hearing and she was very conscious of the watching world, particularly in the United States. She did not want to be seen to be hostile to the cause of peace and reconciliation.

  FitzGerald felt a greater sense of urgency than Mrs Thatcher. He was preoccupied with the idea that Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, might overtake the more moderate nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who were led by John Hume.* This, he believed, would destabilize not only Northern Ireland, but also the Republic. He wanted to bring the Nationalist parties together to work out a common approach to the Northern Ireland question which would bolster the SDLP. To this end, without support from Mrs Thatcher, who was suspicious of all-Ireland solutions, he set up the New Ireland Forum in May 1983.

  After her famous victory in the general election of June 1983, Mrs Thatcher found that FitzGerald’s agenda dominated discussion of Northern Ireland’s future.† Although she did not much like the ‘Irish dimension’, she had few friends, advisers or political colleagues who gave her creative advice about Ulster’s future from a Unionist point of view. After the election, she had promoted her closest Unionist associate, her PPS Ian Gow, to be minister of housing, so he was no longer at her side. She had little personal relationship with the Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux‡ (‘he was perfectly all right … he was not a strong person’) – and was uncomfortable with the ‘arch-Unionist’ Ian Paisley (‘he was not easy’).13§ Although she retained respect for Enoch Powell who, since October 1974, had sat as an Ulster Unionist MP, she could not countenance his anti-American conspiracy theories. ‘Enoch thought’, she privately recalled, ‘that some of the violence in Northern Ireland had been carried out by the American secret service – it was absolutely mad.’14 To general surprise, she kept Jim Prior on as Northern Ireland secretary after the 1983 election.

  Mrs Thatcher’s Unionist instincts faced an even more formidable obstacle than Dublin – Robert Armstrong and his Cabinet Office colleagues, most notably David Goodall.* Worried by the idea that the Foreign Office should take the lead in discussions with the Republic about a part of the United Kingdom, Mrs Thatcher had much earlier decided that the Cabinet Office should be in charge (see Volume I, Chapter 21). Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, had urged this course, but his own views were even more ‘green’ (sympathetic to Irish nationalism) than those of the Foreign Office. Armstrong’s counterpart in Dublin was Dermot Nally,† whom Armstrong had known since 1979. The two men had a ‘mutual respect and friendship’ and found that they agreed about the need to improve relations between the two governments.‡ It was the ‘Armstrong–Nally process’ – formally known as the steering committee of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council (the apparatus set up by Mrs Thatcher and FitzGerald in 1981 to consider matters of mutual concern to both governments) – which kept contacts between London and Dublin alive in the most difficult days.§ Goodall, a cerebral and almost saintly Roman Catholic of partially Anglo-Irish Protestant descent, was deputy secretary at the Cabinet Office. ‘I was always thinking about Ireland,’ he recalled. ‘So was Robert Armstrong,’15 although at this stage Goodall had never visited Northern Ireland. He took part in even more negotiations than his boss. Both men were far more expert in the subject than Mrs Thatcher. They were highly professional civil servants who knew how to observe the proprieties, but they never agreed with her. ‘Robert never definitely overstepped the mark,’ said Charles Powell, ‘but they were all going behind her back. Their meetings were principally to discuss how to handle her.’16

  So it was Robert Armstrong who wrote to Mrs Thatcher after her election victory in June 1983, and urged her to get back on terms with the Republic, using the summit with the Taoiseach which had recently been agreed for November. It was precisely because the report of the New Ireland Forum would be unwelcome, Armstrong explained, that the governments should re-engage: ‘It will help to give it [the Forum report] a lower profile if there is already an established dialogue between Dublin and London on other, less contentious, subjects.’17 He wanted a ‘measured resumption of business’ after the Falklands froideur. Mrs Thatcher smelt a rat. ‘I don’t like this at all,’ she wrote. ‘The truth is that we haven’t anything to talk about save security and E.E.C. matters … This is how we get into difficult situations with the Uni
onists.’18 She never forbade the process, however, and so Armstrong had, in effect, permission to press forward.

  Over the next few months, Irish officials took the initiative, and discussed how best to approach the British. ‘It was clear’, recalled FitzGerald’s close adviser Michael Lillis,* ‘that there was no possibility of having negotiations with Mrs Thatcher which focused on anything except security. She had no interest in what nationalists would call political progress or any of those ideas.’19 The trick was to think up something sufficiently enticing for Mrs Thatcher to accept some ideas of political progress as trade-offs for security co-operation. In September, while visiting Dublin, David Goodall had found himself invited by Lillis for a walk along the Grand Canal. As they walked, Lillis conveyed to him ideas which Goodall considered ‘far-reaching’.20 FitzGerald, he said, would be prepared to support formal recognition of the Union in return for the ‘participation of Irish security forces in operations in the North and of Irish judges in terrorist trials there’.21 This later grew into the idea that the Republic would repeal Articles 2 and 3 of its 1937 Constitution which laid claim to Northern Ireland. Such a repeal would have to be approved in a referendum. No formal offer of a constitutional amendment was made, but the idea was now dangled before Mrs Thatcher.† It was, perhaps, surprising that British officials set so much store by the idea of changing the 1937 Constitution. The idea had come up previously, and was not quite as momentous as it seemed. Articles 2 and 3 meant little in international law since, in 1925, the treaty between Ireland and Britain had recognized the partition of Ireland. If Articles 2 and 3 had significance, it was an emotional and political rather than a legal or practical one.22