The Opposition in the House of Commons was in angry mood for Question Time and Mrs Thatcher’s statement that afternoon. Against criticism from Tony Benn she stated her general theory: ‘If one refuses to take any risks because of the consequences, the terrorist Governments will win and one can only cringe before them.’80 During her statement, she was interrupted by insults (the Labour MP Andrew Faulds called Reagan ‘her cretinous friend’, an interjection which the Speaker forced him to withdraw). Mrs Thatcher kept returning in her remarks to the importance of self-defence. She defended her ground firmly, and faced no serious criticism from her own side. She ‘could hardly have been more resolute as an ally and a friend’, reported the US Ambassador, Charlie Price.81 Afterwards, Reagan telephoned to thank her. She repeated to him what she had said to Benn, and he commented ‘that Britain and America had learned over 40 years ago of the dangers of appeasement’.82 He said that ‘when, in the speech of the previous night, he had referred to the cooperation of European allies, he had only one country in mind: the United Kingdom. He was deeply grateful.’
No doubt these words produced a warm glow in Mrs Thatcher – and gave her the appeasement comparison which she was able to play back to Paul Nitze the following week – but in her conversation with Reagan she frankly expressed anxiety. She fretted – rightly, as it turned out – that the raids were not hugely effective or well targeted, and she told him that it was ‘a difficult task to secure wide public understanding and support for this in the United Kingdom’.83 She was effectively saying that he was in her debt.
What Mrs Thatcher called ‘public understanding’ did not improve much, from her point of view. BBC reporting of the bombing was clearly hostile, and so was much editorial comment in the British press. The action, judged the Financial Times, was ‘futile, deplorable and almost certainly counter-productive … Mrs Thatcher was wrong to give in to US pressure.’84 In a debate in the Commons the following day, Mrs Thatcher put in what Peter Riddell called ‘one of her most effective performances’,85 sticking firmly to her line of principle: ‘Terrorism has to be defeated; it cannot be tolerated or side-stepped. When other ways and other methods have failed – I am the first to wish that they had succeeded – it is right that the terrorist should know that firm steps will be taken to deter him.’86 In order to press her point home in the debate, she had hoped to be able to refer to intelligence material which linked Libya with the terrorist attacks. But she was always ultra-conscious of the need to protect the secret services and approached the possibility of disclosing intelligence (famously used – or, according to critics, abused – by Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq in 2003) with great care. In this case, she accepted the view of her officials that the sources involved were too sensitive to risk exposure. ‘We refused intelligence about Gaddafi,’ recalled Percy Cradock. ‘She understood. She never compromised intelligence in any way.’87 In the Commons, she tried to reassure doubters by saying – which Armstrong had agreed with the administration in advance – that no further US strikes would be launched from British bases without her express permission.
A MORI opinion poll the following day (admittedly based on research before her Commons speech) recorded 71 per cent disapproval of US use of the bases, and a dissatisfaction rating with Mrs Thatcher personally which had risen to 68 per cent from 61 per cent in March.88 On 18 April, the bodies of Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield, the two British hostages, held in the Lebanon, were found in Beirut (an American hostage was also murdered). Mrs Thatcher did not repent her decision to back the United States, and publicly reiterated that ‘We cannot allow ourselves to be deflected in the struggle against terrorism by fear of reprisals.’89 But she was naturally upset. ‘She says she’s been feeling very lonely,’ her journalistic confidant Woodrow Wyatt recorded.90 Price wrote directly to Reagan with a sympathetic assessment: ‘While she has stood up to the political heat with her usual tenacity and style, it looks likely she will pay the price for her decision. As a result, I think it unlikely that Mrs Thatcher would support another similar strike absent an extremely compelling case.’91
Price was essentially right that Mrs Thatcher wanted no more of this, but it was typical of her attitude to difficult situations that she resisted internal attempts to back away. Charles Powell sent a tart note to the Foreign Office on her behalf. The Prime Minister was ‘surprised’, he said, at the minutes of the Ministerial Group on Libya saying that ‘the Government had made clear to the United States that a further request by them to use bases in the United Kingdom would not be welcome and would not necessarily meet with a positive response … She is not aware of any decision made by Ministers in these terms.’ The government of course gave ‘no blank cheque’ to the US, Powell went on, but nor did it rule out further action.92 When Jacques Chirac, the French Prime Minister, visited her at Chequers that weekend, he told her that French opinion polls showed support both for the US attacks and for the French government’s position. Mrs Thatcher exploded with rage:
that reflected a cynical attitude: let the United States do the job and let France keep out of it. The crucial difference between France and the United Kingdom was that France did not have United States forces on its soil. France was in the fortunate position of being defended by the United States without undertaking a whole-hearted commitment to the Alliance … She would argue that this posed an added obligation to be helpful in an emergency.93
She summed up her approach: ‘The Prime Minister said that the United Kingdom did not offer the United States blind devotion. Indeed, we frequently spoke very frankly to them. But there was a matter of loyalty.’ She added acidly that ‘France and the United Kingdom felt differently on this.’94
Two weeks after the raids, Mrs Thatcher’s political difficulties rumbled on: ‘while she is with us,’ reported the US Embassy, ‘she is not with her own people despite every effort on her part to turn around public opinion.’95 In early May the government lost the Ryedale by-election as Tebbit had predicted. For all this, Mrs Thatcher did reap political benefits from her stance on Libya. One was that her conduct throughout, even though the policy was unpopular, helped restore the respect for her leadership which had been weakened by Westland. Whatever else might be said, her actions were not those of an indecisive or cowardly person. She had executed her decision clearly and defended it well. As time went on, she could also point to the fact that Libyan terrorism, despite the lack of physical success in the US raids, did go into retreat. With the glaring exception of the Lockerbie bombing in December 1988, Gaddafi was much subdued. According to Paul Bremer, then the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for counter-terrorism, ‘the Libyans had been planning 34 or 35 subsequent attacks on American targets in Europe. Those were stopped immediately.’96*
More important, the loyalty to allies of which she spoke so strongly to Chirac was recognized in Washington and greatly increased her political capital. Reagan himself repeatedly expressed his gratitude, both in public and in private, in writing and in conversation. Howard Teicher recalled that ‘in the immediate aftermath I suspect that the UK could have asked for and received almost anything it wanted.’97
Mrs Thatcher wanted US help over terrorist extradition. Despite the administration’s general dislike of terrorism, American politics tended to make an exception of Northern Ireland. Irish Americans in Congress were, from a British point of view, unsound on the matter, and American politicians regularly had to bear the Irish vote in mind. The extradition treaty between the USA and Britain contained a loophole, barring extradition if the acts concerned were ‘political’ in nature. In December 1984, the New York federal court had denied the extradition of an IRA gunman, Joseph Doherty, on these grounds. The administration readily agreed to remove the loophole, but the resulting ‘supplementary extradition treaty’ was held up in the Senate. Leaders of the opposition to the change included John Kerry (who was to win the Democratic nomination for the presidential election of 2004 and later become President Obama’s secretary
of state) and Joe Biden (who, in 2009, would become vice-president of the United States). Explaining the situation to the President, John Poindexter, his National Security Advisor, set out how the ‘political’ exemption worked: ‘For example, those who perpetrated the Brighton bombing – which nearly killed Mrs Thatcher – could not have been extradited back to the UK, assuming they had gotten to the US.’98
Mrs Thatcher herself did not use Libya ‘explicitly as a “trade” ’, letting the British action ‘speak for itself’.99 But Price reported a conversation with Geoffrey Howe to Reagan: ‘Geoffrey also reminded me with good humor of the urgent need to get the Extradition Treaty approved. I believe it would be a key demonstration of our appreciation for British support if we could capitalize on Thatcher’s current popularity in Washington to press the treaty through.’100
Reagan took the promptings and swung into action. The following day he wrote to Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ‘As Great Britain demonstrated once again last week, she is our staunchest Ally in the battle against international terrorism. Rejection of the Treaty would be viewed by the British – and the world at large – as a weakening of U.S. resolve. This must not happen.’101 Reagan and Mrs Thatcher discussed the matter further when they met at the G7 summit in Tokyo in May. At the end of the month, the President appealed to the American people in his weekly radio broadcast. He rehearsed the arguments about closing the loophole in the treaty to ‘prevent terrorists who have kidnapped, killed, or maimed people in Britain from finding refuge in our country’. Moreover, he went on: ‘rejection of this treaty would be an affront to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one European leader who, at great political risk, stood shoulder to shoulder with us during our operations against Qadhafi’s terrorism.’102 On 17 July, the Senate ratified the treaty by 87 votes to 10, with even Senators Kerry, Biden and Ted Kennedy voting in favour.
Reagan rang Mrs Thatcher immediately with the news, apologizing for pulling her out of a dinner party with the government whips:
Mrs Thatcher replied that she did not mind being disturbed at dinner, particularly to hear such good news. She graciously said that the President deserved all the credit for the positive outcome. He responded that it was a joint effort and that the Prime Minister and her government had played a large role in the Senate passage. The Prime Minister reemphasized that the outcome would not have been favourable without the President’s many personal efforts.103
Mrs Thatcher’s conclusion over the Libyan affair was that her loyalty to the American alliance had been vindicated, and that the unreliability of European allies had been proved: ‘they are a feeble, weak lot …’ she said later, ‘we alone among Europe helped’ the Americans.104 At the end of May, just as Reagan’s campaign for the extradition treaty was reaching its climax, she was asked to give written answers to questions for The Rich Tide, a forthcoming book about transatlantic relations by David Frost and Michael Shea. Charles Powell redrafted her proposed answers from what he called ‘a late and poor draft from the Foreign Office’. Mrs Thatcher was delighted with his reworking. ‘I think you have done wonders,’ she scribbled. ‘I have deleted just one sentence.’105 The offending sentence was in answer to the question, ‘Is there a special bond that exists between the United Kingdom and the United States that does not exist between the UK and any other country?’ The Powell draft gave an affirmative answer, but added the qualification, ‘We have very close relations with other countries too: with the democratic nations of the Commonwealth, and with Europe.’ Mrs Thatcher struck this out, so that her answer ended with the unqualified words ‘Special means unique, unique to Britain and the United States.’106
Just as the United States made ready to attack Libya, Mrs Thatcher was at Chequers, discussing, for the first time, how to approach the next general election. She was in an edgy mood, made edgier because she was not free to explain to colleagues why. Norman Tebbit had dined and slept at Chequers the night before, but had learnt nothing about the Libyan plan from her. The political high command were present – Howe, Lawson, Tebbit, Young and Whitelaw (though he could only drop in, since he was entertaining royal guests at home). Tebbit was not pleased by the presence of Young, whom he suspected of muscling in on his responsibilities.107 The grandees were assisted by Sherbourne, Brian Griffiths and Michael Dobbs, and also by John Sharkey,* the managing director of Saatchi and Saatchi, who had retained the Conservative account ever since Gordon Reece bestowed it on them, on Mrs Thatcher’s behalf, in 1978. The specific purpose of the meeting, which was held on Sunday 13 April, was to consider the strategy for the run-up to the election, including the results of opinion research which Saatchis had carried out at Tebbit’s request.
The research was presented by Dobbs. Though working full time for Tebbit, he remained deputy chairman of Saatchis, who had seconded him and were paying him. This created an uncomfortable feeling that Dobbs had an interest not only in Tory fortunes, but in supporting whatever Saatchis came up with. The opinion research, he reported, showed a public impression of confused leadership over the Westland crisis. As Sharkey recalled it, ‘Perceptions of Mrs Thatcher had turned from largely positive to slightly negative.’108 In the view of Saatchis and of Tebbit, it was a presentation ‘about the sense of leadership, not about her personally’.109 According to Stephen Sherbourne – although others remember this differently – the presentation involved clips of films in which various women were interviewed and spoke disparagingly of Mrs Thatcher herself.110 At this time, the press were talking about what they called ‘the TBW factor’ as counting against the Conservatives with the public. TBW stood for ‘That Bloody Woman’. Mrs Thatcher herself had known about it since the previous June, when David Frost had introduced her to the phrase on air.111 Although the offensive acronym was naturally not used in the presentation, Mrs Thatcher sensed that this was what it was getting at.† She did not like what she was being told. There was no shouting match or scene, but when Dobbs was about to display the illustrative boards which summarized his talk, she seized them and ‘threw them into a corner before they’d been shown’.112
It was not immediately obvious to all that things had gone badly wrong. Sharkey went away from the meeting thinking it had been ‘reasonably successful’.113 Sherbourne, however, who knew Mrs Thatcher better, noticed her anger: ‘Dobbs almost had to pick up his bags and go.’114 It did not take long for rumours to filter back that all was not well. Dobbs soon found himself ‘disinvited from every election planning meeting’.115 Since he was Tebbit’s right-hand man, this was, in effect, a rejection of Tebbit. The presentation at Chequers had upset her not only because it wounded her vanity but also because it confirmed her suspicions. Even when she had appointed Tebbit as chairman the previous September, she had not bestowed her full trust on him, and so had created a problem for him and for herself. He was too big and too popular a figure with party supporters for her to be easy with him in a role which might allow him to stand between her and her base. In the post-Westland atmosphere, there was a strong sense that her leadership was insecure. Robin Harris,* who, as head of the Conservative Research Department, saw a lot of both Mrs Thatcher and Tebbit at this time, recalled, ‘I thought she’d be a goner over Westland. If she did go, Norman was a very likely successor. I wasn’t plotting with him, but I did want him [to be leader if Mrs Thatcher fell]. It is absurd to suppose he was not even thinking about it.’116 Young thought that ‘Norman was just too popular: she suffered from ageing-lion syndrome in relation to him.’117 She particularly feared his close relationship with Saatchis, hence her suspicion of Dobbs. A small symptom of her anxiety was apparent in an argument with Tebbit, just before appointing Dobbs early in the year, about what his job title should be. ‘Deputy Chairman,’ suggested Tebbit. ‘No,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘PA.’ The compromise was ‘Chief of Staff’.118
Even before the Chequers meeting, some of those close to her had fed her anxieties. Tim Bell, the man who – with Gordon Reece �
�� Mrs Thatcher liked the most of all those in the world of advertising and PR, had fallen out with Saatchis and left them. They had made a curious arrangement which paid him a retainer of £48,000 a year not to do any work for the Conservative Party without their agreement.119† This did not, however, prevent Mrs Thatcher privately seeing her old friend Bell, who naturally rejoiced that she wanted his advice. As Dobbs put it, ‘Tim was sneaking in through the dustbins.’120 Tebbit, however, was against Bell. He had learnt from Cecil Parkinson that Bell’s drug-taking during the 1983 election campaign had made him almost impossible to deal with.121 He had firm, old-fashioned views on such matters. In 1985 Bell wrote to Mrs Thatcher to tell her about his problem with drugs, which he said he had now overcome. Her friendly response was ‘If you’ve stopped, there’s an end of it.’122* Bell was now undergoing rehabilitation, but Tebbit remained uneasy. Once he had decided that he did not want Bell on his Central Office team in any way, he had set himself on a collision course with Mrs Thatcher.123
Bell’s ally in all this – and Tebbit’s challenger for Mrs Thatcher’s ear – was David Young. Although unelected, Young had exceptionally strong political ambitions, and had it in mind that he could be party chairman.124 As a peer, he obviously presented no threat to Mrs Thatcher’s leadership. As an adviser, he could influence her strongly, often against people who were elected. In the view of Stephen Sherbourne, Mrs Thatcher ‘loved David and adored Tim’.125 She had much more ambiguous feelings about Tebbit. In this area of political life, outside the stricter structures of policy and government, Mrs Thatcher was vulnerable to flattery and manipulation. There was too much of the atmosphere of a court. ‘I began to understand Tudor history better,’ recalled Tebbit.126
The presence of Bell and Young meant that there was, in effect, a parallel operation to prepare for the general election. Both men questioned the work of Saatchi and Saatchi, persuading Mrs Thatcher to look secretly at opinion research produced by a rival firm, Young and Rubicam.† According to that firm’s chairman, John Banks, it was Mrs Thatcher ‘at all times who wanted a restricted circulation [for Young and Rubicam’s work] and for it to be kept clear of Tebbit’.127 Bell and Young also disparaged Tebbit’s efforts. ‘Norman had never run anything,’ recalled Young, ‘and I could see that things hadn’t got far at Central Office.’128 What made matters particularly awkward was that there was some truth in their criticisms. Saatchis was going through an uncreative phase. Tebbit, though a brilliant public performer and political streetfighter, was not an organizer. As even Michael Dobbs admitted, ‘Norman couldn’t reach out to the people at Central Office. They didn’t like not seeing enough of him. He’d be thinking about his wife at home.’129 Central Office people considered that Tebbit and Dobbs were ‘buddies who shut the door and laughed too much’ instead of encouraging them all to work harmoniously: ‘Norman was chaotic.’130 ‘They told me’, Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘that he’d never been around Central Office.’131 ‘It was a bloody awful time,’ Dobbs remembered.132
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