Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  The weekend in which the Wapping dispute began coincided with Mrs Thatcher’s preparation for her final showdown over Westland in the House of Commons on the coming Monday. Murdoch consulted Woodrow Wyatt: ‘He says, “There’s an unfortunate cartoon in the News of the World showing Mrs Thatcher choking on leek soup. Do you think she’ll mind?” ’246 Wyatt thought not. At the end of that day’s entry he recorded, ‘When I spoke to Rupert I said I had two friends in difficulties, him and Margaret, and he said, “Yes, but I’m winning.” ’247

  Part Three

  * * *

  RECOVERY

  15

  TBW

  ‘While she is with us, she is not with her own people’

  The immediate effect of the Westland affair was to cut Mrs Thatcher down to size politically. ‘Hurd warns Maggie’ was the headline in the Evening Standard the day after the final Commons debate on Westland, after Hurd had told the BBC’s Today programme that Mrs Thatcher ‘must not run the Government as a one-woman band’.1 All those Cabinet colleagues irritated by her approach and style now did their best to rein her in. John Biffen warned that ‘Toryism is not a raucous political faction.’ Peter Walker said that the Conservatives could still win the next general election if they could more successfully project their concern about unemployment, which had just risen, in the figures announced in January, to 3,407,729, the highest ever.2 ‘Collective responsibility’, wrote Ferdinand Mount, ‘is only a code phrase for “the quiet life with no radical or contentious stuff”.’3 It was also a phrase which always implied a criticism of Mrs Thatcher. She herself believed that many senior Tories were trying to get her out. ‘I am not going,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt. ‘I will fight them all the way.’4

  The spring of 1986 proved tough going for Mrs Thatcher. The immediate issue on which her Cabinet colleagues fastened was the future of British Leyland (BL). In her memoirs, she wrote that ‘the most damaging effect of the Westland affair was the fuel which had been poured on the flames of anti-Americanism’.5 The British motor industry was a good opportunity to stoke the fires higher.

  Before the Westland crisis, questions about the future of BL had been becoming more urgent. During Westland, they became critical. For a long time, Mrs Thatcher had been impatient with BL’s failure to fulfil its promises of improvement. ‘Time after time, we had forecasts of improvements and they just didn’t come,’ she later recalled.6 By 1986, BL had received some £2 billion from the British taxpayer over a ten-year period.7 Mrs Thatcher believed the best future lay in separating the company into its constituent parts and, where possible, privatizing. This had happened successfully with Jaguar, which demerged from BL and became a separate publicly quoted company in July 1984. International interest grew. Honda, from Japan, signed an agreement for joint model development with BL in Swindon in April 1985. General Motors (GM) in the United States expressed a desire for Leyland Truck and Bus and, separately, for Land Rover. There was disagreement between Mrs Thatcher and Norman Tebbit, at that time the DTI Secretary. She wanted to open the market as much as possible. Tebbit thought that Land Rover was ‘a name strongly identified with … British excellence in product design and engineering’:8 ‘I do not believe it will be easy to gain public acceptance for … handing such a particularly British undertaking to US control,’ he told her. Mrs Thatcher had little patience with such objections. ‘There weren’t any British solutions: that was the fact of the matter,’ she later recalled. And she harboured a greater fear: ‘I didn’t want it to go German.’9 Tension rose in the summer of 1985 when Tebbit suspected he was being leaked against by her Policy Unit. Andrew Turnbull, her Treasury private secretary, reported to Robin Butler, Tebbit’s ‘extreme sensitivity’. She might have to ‘choose between pushing through her view on BL and keeping in with Mr Tebbit’.10 She reshuffled Tebbit in September 1985 before this choice became unavoidable, and made him party chairman (see Chapter 13).

  Replacing Tebbit, Leon Brittan pursued the GM discussions. But, as Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit warned her, ‘GM are only at the starting line; BL will provide plenty of chicanes before they reach the chequered flag.’11 So it proved. At the end of November, just when the Westland story was becoming dramatic, Brittan told her that he would press ahead with the sale to GM, but added that ‘the real problem is political; the deal will have enough natural opponents, some of them on our own backbenches, to make it essential to avoid also bringing out against us the West Midlands lobbies associated with Austin Rover.’12 This was the present danger because, almost immediately after Brittan had sent his memo, Ford told him of its own interest in Austin Rover, BL’s volume car-maker. In one way, this was great news for Mrs Thatcher’s revolution in industry. At last the once-moribund company was something whose bits the world wanted to own. In another, it was terrible timing. As Peter Warry of the Policy Unit put it to her, ‘BL could be history by the middle of 1986. The downside is the political difficulty of selling the whole of BL to foreign multinationals.’13 The GM project was codenamed Salton, the Ford bid Maverick.

  In early December 1985, Mrs Thatcher, Brittan and Nigel Lawson met and agreed to pursue the Ford discussions. Wisely, no one informed Michael Heseltine of what was afoot. Mrs Thatcher was acutely aware of the tricky politics. If the American bids could go forward without British or European companies being seen to have a chance to bid too, it would be Westland all over again, and on a far more important issue. On 27 January 1986, the day when she finally calmed Westland down in parliamentary terms, she was informed of Norman Tebbit’s view that the combination of the two American bids was too controversial. He ‘could not recommend’ going ahead with the Ford deal at this time.14 He said he preferred the idea of Austin Rover and Ford forming together a ‘European holding company’ which ‘could be represented as an important step forward towards the creation of a European car industry’. Tebbit might no longer be the relevant departmental head on the subject but, since he was party Chairman and the administration’s leading Thatcherite, his support was essential. If her greatest maverick did not like Maverick, how many others were likely to support it?

  That weekend, news of the Ford interest and of the GM bid was leaked by – Mrs Thatcher believed – people in BL itself and reached the front pages of several Monday newspapers. What was good for General Motors, warned the Daily Mail, was not necessarily good for Britain.15 On Monday 3 February, Paul Channon, who had taken over at the DTI after Brittan’s resignation, had to come to the Commons to admit what was going on. The matter was debated in Parliament two days later, and Edward Heath, relishing his moment, led the charge against the government. ‘Let us get away from this so-called anti-Americanism,’ he said, stoking it;16 ‘because of Westland, and now because of this, the public are becoming anti-American. They do not want to see our country and our industries handed over more and more to the American firms.’ His solution was almost spookily like that of Norman Tebbit, normally his bitter opponent: ‘a European arrangement … which would be a joint operation’.17 This was the mood of the House, reflected in the media. Mrs Thatcher considered it ‘a kind of pseudo-patriotic hysteria’.18

  The next day, at what she described as ‘an extremely difficult meeting of the Cabinet’,19 Mrs Thatcher found herself supported only by Lawson in her desire to push on with Maverick. Colleagues were clamorous about the need not to repeat Westland. That afternoon, Channon told Parliament that the Ford bid would not be pursued. The press reported this decision as a ‘climb-down’ or a ‘humiliation’ for Mrs Thatcher. The Express claimed that it was the ‘fastest U-turn on record’.20

  It had been very much a decision of the Cabinet. ‘We stopped it, you know,’ Douglas Hurd told the present author a few days after the event, emphasizing the ‘We’.21 Mrs Thatcher was upset, and wrote to Donald E. Petersen, the chairman of the Ford Motor Company, to say how sorry she was. She blamed the leak and the ‘resulting speculation, uncertainty and public apprehension’.22 Ford did not doubt her own commitment, Petersen said in
reply, but had been amazed by the ‘quite hostile responses’ in Britain to its ‘honest initiative’23 which it ‘still felt hard to understand completely’. Mrs Thatcher felt ‘we were very vulnerable because Ford had very big operations in England and it was dead easy for them to take them to the Continent … We went to great lengths to reassure Ford and calm them down.’24

  Inevitably, the opposition to the Ford bid was unappeased by its victory and moved its target to the GM one. Mrs Thatcher was furious. Officials kept urging her to deal with the question collectively in government and be seen to keep an open mind about other bids for Land Rover. To ensure this, she set up a small ministerial group to work out the way forward with GM. But the next day, 20 February, in Cabinet, colleagues warned her that the GM takeover could not go ahead – ‘My postbag enormous, & universally hostile’ (Tebbit), ‘We are in danger of a major disaster’ (Whitelaw).25 She moaned that she was ‘Fed up with people of considerable wealth [who] don’t come forward with British bids, but want it all on British taxpayer’. ‘I fear consequences of what we did in rejecting Ford,’ she said.26 Sure enough, the pressure of party and public opinion was too great. A compromise attempt by the government to persuade GM to buy just under half of Land Rover failed. On 25 March, Channon had to tell the Commons that GM was not prepared to buy Leyland Trucks and its freight business if it were not allowed control. The fact that Mrs Thatcher, the most pro-American of modern British prime ministers, was compelled to abort both these deals showed how politically weak she had become.

  Just two weeks later, in early April, Mrs Thatcher found her pro-American sympathies brought to the fore once again, in what was now a decidedly hostile climate. For some time, terrorist attacks sponsored by Libya had been a growing problem. There were several outrages in 1985. These culminated in attacks at Rome and Vienna airports on 27 December, carried out by the Abu Nidal terrorist organization and supported by Libya, which killed nineteen people. On 7 January 1986, Reagan had announced sanctions against Libya in a televised press conference. He also threatened ‘further steps’ if sanctions proved inadequate. He wrote privately to European leaders, asking for their support.

  Britain was in no doubt about the unpleasantness of Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan regime. On 17 April 1984, WPC Yvonne Fletcher, policing an anti-Gaddafi protest outside the Libyan Embassy in London, had been killed by a shot fired from an Embassy window. Getting no co-operation from Libya in finding the culprit, Britain broke off diplomatic relations, banned arms exports and put strict restrictions on investments and immigration.27 It was ‘very difficult to do much with Qadhafi* because he is mad’, Mrs Thatcher told Vice-President George Bush in July 1985.28 Nonetheless, she had a long-standing dislike of economic sanctions. She believed – most notably in the case of South Africa, where she stood out against almost all her fellow members of the Commonwealth (see Chapter 16) – that sanctions were ineffective and damaged the people who imposed them. ‘Look!’ she told American correspondents on 10 January, in response to Reagan’s call for sanctions. ‘Sanctions do not work if other people supply the goods. Other people do supply the goods.’29 She believed that Reagan, who had supported her arguments in relation to South Africa, was now undermining the general case.

  Worse was the possibility that the Americans might resort to military action. If so, she told Woodrow Wyatt in confidence, ‘we can’t support them.’30 Presumably mindful of her unhappy experience over Grenada, at her press conference she tried to head the President off:

  I must warn you that I do not believe in retaliatory strikes which are against international law. We suffer from terrorism in this country and in Northern Ireland. What would you think if I said … that we would be entitled to go in hot pursuit or engage in retaliatory strikes? You would be absolutely against me, and so would I, because it would be contrary to international law … Now, I quite agree terrorism is against international law, but I believe that one has to fight it by legal means.31

  She made this statement the day after Michael Heseltine had resigned as defence secretary in the midst of the Westland crisis. The last thing she needed at this point was entanglement in a controversial military adventure.

  In her private reply to Reagan’s letter, however, Mrs Thatcher concentrated on her case against sanctions, and said little about retaliation. Studying her response, Reagan’s staff seized on this omission: ‘The letter is perhaps more important for what it does not say. She makes no mention of her public remarks to the effect that international law prohibits punitive strikes against states that harbour terrorists. She does, however, subtly ask that “we remain in close touch as our thinking develops”.’32 The staffers were not wrong in noticing Mrs Thatcher’s careful positioning for what might lie ahead. She sensed that the Americans meant business on this issue, and she did not want to rule herself out of the discussion.

  That week, the President sent his Deputy Secretary of State, John Whitehead, on a mission to European capitals to strengthen allied resolve against Libya. Whitehead conveyed the administration’s anger. Mrs Thatcher’s recent public remarks ‘had been seen as a slap in the face to the President’, he told Geoffrey Howe. Howe’s office reported to Downing Street Whitehead’s view that ‘the time had come for offensive action to topple Qadhafi’ – ‘his private message was disquieting and his tone distinctly coercive.’33

  By this stage, Mrs Thatcher’s mind was churning about how she could help Reagan against Libya without sanctions and without entering the realms of illegality. On the following Monday, during a visit to Lille to announce the project for the Channel Tunnel (see Chapter 12), she discussed the problem with President Mitterrand. The United States was very ‘cross’ about the lack of British support over Libya, she told him, and she wondered whether military retaliation against terrorist training camps could be justified. She worried that it was little different from ‘attacking the country’. Mitterrand told her that he would support ‘precise attacks’ (a phrase which Mrs Thatcher underlined in the record of their conversation). He also suggested that the allies should create ‘internal difficulties’ for Gaddafi, in secret.34 A few days later, large quantities of Libyan rifles and ammunition – Gaddafi’s supplies for the IRA – were found hidden in sites in Co. Sligo and Co. Roscommon in the Republic of Ireland. This discovery gave Mrs Thatcher, if she needed one, a reminder of how Gaddafi was actively threatening Britain. It may well have strengthened her desire to assist the United States. The British government looked into various ways of making life difficult for Gaddafi, while bearing in mind that the target should be ‘the regime rather than the man’.35 As Charles Powell scribbled on top of a Foreign Office note for her eyes, ‘The (reluctant) conclusion is that there is not much we can do.’36

  The Americans forced the issue, alone. In March, they began a series of naval manoeuvres in the Gulf of Sirte, international waters which Gaddafi claimed as his own. Coming under missile attack from the Libyan coast, the US attacked the launch site and sank two Libyan patrol boats. Gaddafi sent out a general message to all his European ‘People’s Bureaux’ (as he preferred to call his country’s embassies) ordering them to mount terrorist attacks on US military and civilian targets. This and other Libyan cable traffic carrying more specific messages were intercepted with assistance from GCHQ at Cheltenham. On 4 April, a message was picked up from the East Berlin People’s Bureau to Tripoli saying, ‘We have something planned that will make you happy … It will happen soon, the bomb will blow, American soldiers must be hit.’37 The Libyans were as bad as their word. In the early hours of 5 April, a bomb went off in the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, a haunt of US servicemen. Three people, one of them an American soldier, were killed. The Americans decided at once that they had now found the ‘smoking gun’ and could and should hit back. They despatched messages from the President to their allies.

  The most important of these came to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I have reluctantly taken the decision to use US military forces to exact a response to these Libyan
attacks,’ said the President.38 He requested the use of British airfields where US F-111s were based, so that they could attack Libya.* His request arrived on 8 April, asking for an answer by noon (GMT) the following day. The Americans assumed, erroneously, that British agreement would be pretty much automatic. But Mrs Thatcher, meeting Howe and the new Defence Secretary George Younger after a formal dinner for the President of South Korea, played for time.† As Percy Cradock, her foreign policy adviser, later put it: ‘We were not entirely surprised; but we were worried. The request was far from precise and we were not sure that the Administration had thought through the consequences … Above all, there were British hostages in the Lebanon [two employees of the American University in Beirut who were held by Libyan proxies, and were therefore at extreme risk].’39 The fact that Reagan’s request came when anti-American feeling was still running high following Westland and the abortive sale of British Leyland was also unhelpful. Mrs Thatcher’s reply, sent early in the morning of the following day, ignored the US deadline for a decision and instead sought more information.‡ She reiterated her opposition to terrorism and her ‘instinct’ always to support the United States, but explained that ‘your message causes me very considerable anxiety … I would like you to tell me more precisely what you have in mind.’ What were the targets, she wondered? Would other countries be involved? She also raised wider concerns – the risk of ‘getting us into a cycle of revenge and counter-revenge, in which many more innocent lives will be lost’. And she wanted to know the exact nature of the justification, once again raising the comparison with Northern Ireland: ‘I have to live with the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic across which terrorists come daily. We have lost 2,500 of our people in the last ten years, but we have never crossed that border to exact revenge.’ ‘Indeed,’ she added tartly, ‘I wonder what the reaction would be in the United States if we did.’* Self-defence was a much better legal justification than punitive action. Besides, ‘The effect in the Arab world, where we all have very major economic interests … could be devastating.’ ‘I am deeply troubled by what you propose,’ she concluded, but added that she wrote ‘in the spirit of loyalty and friendship’.40