The next day’s plenary session was worse still: ‘The Prime Minister was lectured on morality, on preferring British jobs to black African lives, on being concerned for pennies rather than principles,’44 reported Powell. Characteristically, she ‘reminded her critics of their own trade and other links with South Africa and some of the less satisfactory features of their societies, particularly when it came to human rights’. She pointed out that they were perfectly willing to trade with the USSR, a more oppressive regime even than the South African one.
In these sessions, Mrs Thatcher exercised her unique mixture of conviction and guile. She was perfectly genuine in her principled opposition to sanctions, and in her anger with other member states, but she was also playing a game to minimize the demands made upon Britain. Contemptuous though she was of the moral pretensions of the Commonwealth, she did not, in fact, want a formal split. As the plenary session broke for lunch, she discussed with her officials the need ‘to offer two very modest additional measures’45 – a ban on the import of South African Krugerrands (gold coins) to Britain and the ending of official support for trade promotions to South Africa. These ideas had been prepared in advance of the conference by Mrs Thatcher and officials to keep up her sleeve. Britain would offer them if the Commonwealth would agree to call for ‘a suspension of violence’.* The United Kingdom would take no further measures beyond these.
Mrs Thatcher now changed her act from anger to injury. At 3.30, she returned for ‘a very chilly encounter’46 with the drafting committee. She said she felt ‘deep hurt’ at some of the morning’s remarks which were not ‘in keeping with the Commonwealth spirit of fairness’. ‘It was extraordinary’, Mrs Thatcher recalled,
how the pack instinct of politicians could change a group of normally courteous, in some cases even charming, people into a gang of bullies … So I began by saying that I had never been so insulted as I had by the people in that room and that it was an entirely unacceptable way of conducting international business.47
Feeling bad at this spectacle of a woman scorned, some of those present ‘urged her not to take the remarks personally’. Mrs Thatcher exploited the moment to offer her two concessions, saying that it would be easier for her domestically if they were rejected, since her stand against sanctions was popular with her supporters at home. If her offer were not accepted, she would withdraw it and the United Kingdom would make a unilateral statement at the end of the conference. The leaders asked for a short break to reflect: ‘Some ten minutes later a distinctly more cheerful Ramphal appeared to say that “We are in business.” ’48
At a meeting at 5 p.m., the text she sought was approved, unchanged. There were many speeches in praise of Mrs Thatcher, in what Powell described as ‘a shame-faced reaction to the morning’s session about which the Prime Minister had succeeded in making them all feel perfectly rotten. The meeting ended with a round of applause for the Prime Minister.’49 ‘I suddenly became a stateswoman for having accepted a “compromise”,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote mockingly in her memoirs.50 The compromise was that the Commonwealth would indeed send an Eminent Persons Group (EPG) to investigate the situation in South Africa and report. If the eminences reported unfavourably on progress to ending apartheid, the issue of sanctions (‘further measures’ was the chosen, Thatcher-driven phrase to water down the concept) would be reopened.
In Powell’s loyal but, in this case, correct view, Mrs Thatcher had overcome the difficulties she had faced with ‘consummate skill’.51 She had maximized her position of complete isolation on sanctions by making her opponents feel guilty. Calculating that they greatly preferred some sort of unanimous agreement to none, she had offered a couple of small inducements to include Britain in their final ‘accord’. She had not persuaded any of them that she was right, but she had won the two things she most wanted – no sanctions, for now at least, and no serious compromise of Britain’s right to take an independent view of the question.
As for the EPG, she thought no better of the idea than when it had first been floated, but because she had agreed to it, she could strongly influence its choice of members. She spoke privately about it to Geoffrey Howe at Lyford Cay. She was worried, she told him, that the South African government would refuse to see the group. This problem would be overcome if the Foreign Secretary himself would chair it. He ‘would be the most effective spokesman and the person best able to keep some control of the Group’s activities’.52 She did not, apparently, see that the main minister of a British government with a policy of its own in the matter could not be accepted by the Commonwealth as its independent representative. According to Powell’s official record, Howe was ‘not averse’ to her idea, though he was ‘concerned about the compatibility of his obligations’. The actual mood of the meeting, however, was rather different. When Howe asked how his job could be done in his absence, Mrs Thatcher airily replied, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ll be my own Foreign Secretary!’ Howe, who shrank from conflict, made no direct protest, but this was, for him, ‘the killer-blow’.53 She was soon dissuaded from putting Howe’s name forward, but she had clearly, almost artlessly, expressed her true wishes. For him, they were unforgettably humiliating.
As soon as the last-minute agreement was reached, Bernard Ingham wrote to Mrs Thatcher. What should he tell the press? Always and only concerned with the domestic audience, he framed the issue thus: ‘Your main problem will be to kill the charge that you have had to give a lot in order to get an agreement – i.e. that you have done a U-turn – without immediately rubbishing as of no account the additional measures taken.’54
Achieving this balance was not something which Mrs Thatcher was instinctively good at. She was proud not of what she had agreed, but of what she hadn’t. After all, she was not excited by the formal result – that the Commonwealth now had a policy on South Africa. When asked on television about the summit, she put her forefinger and thumb close to each other and said that she had moved only ‘a tiny little bit’, compared with ‘what we were faced with’.55 ‘With four little words,’ wrote Howe, who was sitting beside her when she uttered them, ‘she had at one and the same time humiliated three dozen other heads of government, devalued the policy on which they had just agreed – and demeaned herself.’56* There is a vehemence in what he wrote which perhaps tries to make up for his failure to protest at the time. As he flew back to London with Mrs Thatcher, ‘none of us said anything critical.’57 He chewed the toad, as he had done before and would do again, but with increasing difficulty and distaste.†
The Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group took shape, with Lord Barber,‡ Edward Heath’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer, as its British member.§ Mrs Thatcher was not enthusiastic about its work, and chafed at the caution of the Foreign Office in discouraging her from engaging with alternative sources of ideas, of all races, in South Africa. In November, when Enos Mabuza, the chief executive of KaNgwane, one of the ‘homelands’, asked to see her, the Foreign Office advised her not to because he was not a political radical, but Charles Powell told her this was ‘a bit stodgy. I gather Laurens van der Post would favour you seeing him.’58 So she did.
Of the various ‘irregulars’ whose views, in most areas of life, she sought, van der Post was one of the most unusual. A brilliant, charming, beautiful old man of Afrikaner birth, he wrote powerfully about his native land, about history, literature and anthropology of the ‘noble savage’ variety. He was considered a spiritual counsellor by many, and was a guru to the Prince of Wales, who made him godfather to his elder son, Prince William. He was also, though this was unknown to Mrs Thatcher, something of a fantasist, claiming knowledge and experience that he did not always possess, and using it to establish connections with important people.* He was a genuine and long-standing opponent of apartheid, and also of the ANC, whose Communist elements he mistrusted. Part of his romantic obsession with the unWesternized glory of the black African was his admiration for the Zulus, whose language he falsely implied he could speak. This led him to favou
r the Inkatha movement led by the Zulu Chief Minister, Mangosuthu Buthelezi,† who opposed sanctions and was supported by large numbers of Zulus, particularly in the rural areas. It was van der Post who, in August 1985, first introduced Mrs Thatcher to Buthelezi and, in Charles Powell’s view, ‘fooled her’59 that Buthelezi was more important and more influential than he was. Since, like van der Post, she was always looking for a plural black leadership rather than an ANC monopoly, Mrs Thatcher was readily persuaded. Buthelezi was the only non-ANC black leader with a large popular following. She would later go to considerable lengths to keep him in play as a counterbalance to ANC power.
Mrs Thatcher had known van der Post since being introduced to him in opposition by Airey Neave and Ian Gow, who was his solicitor. She fell for his mage-like wisdom and the flattering calls he made to her, particularly under the stress of the Falklands War. Charles Powell considered that he ‘talked such transparent rubbish’,60 but he usually facilitated his meetings with her and made sure she saw his letters on a range of subjects, of which South Africa was the most important.* Van der Post had real influence with Mrs Thatcher and gave her the feeling, which she always needed in all controversial policy areas, that there were genuine alternatives to the version which officials kept pushing on her.† Thanks to van der Post, No. 10 also had an informant at the top level of the South African government in the form of the minister Piet Koornhof,‡ who, from 1979, secretly provided information, via intermediaries, about the tensions in Botha’s Cabinet and the opportunities for change. Koornhof led what van der Post called ‘an enlightened movement in South African Internal policy’.61 The sort of knowledge he furnished helped Mrs Thatcher to feel that her pressure might get somewhere.62
Her other source of alternative views on the subject was Fritz Leutwiler,§ the former president of the Swiss National Bank and chairman and president of the Bank for International Settlements. She had come to know and like Leutwiler while on holiday staying with Lady Glover in Switzerland, where he had warned her about the direction of her own monetary policy in 1980 (see Volume I, p. 530). In 1985, Leutwiler agreed to orchestrate the rescue of South Africa from the bank crisis provoked by Chase Manhattan. He was backed by the German and Swiss banks which were furious at their US equivalents for pulling the plug on their South African operations without consulting them. In this he was successful, and won Mrs Thatcher’s admiration.63 She agreed with his belief that the roll-over of debts which he negotiated would ‘give time for political reforms to be introduced’64 and with his warning that a white ‘backlash’ against Botha was likely if he went too far, too fast. Leutwiler shared her desire for an orderly end to apartheid and her anxieties about the ANC. At this time, he became her ‘main contact’ with P. W. Botha.65
Much as she preferred van der Post’s gleaming-eyed accounts of warrior races, lost worlds and Zulu honour to being lectured at Commonwealth conferences, Mrs Thatcher retained a practical grasp of what was happening. Now that the EPG (the Eminent Persons Group agreed at Lyford Cay) existed, she realized that, rather than repudiate it, she had to try to steer it in the right direction. So when, on 12 November, P. W. Botha wrote to tell her that, despite her ‘strong, principled stand [at Nassau] against economic sanctions’, his government would not agree to her request to co-operate with the Commonwealth initiative,66 she replied bluntly, ‘I have to say that I am very disappointed by your message.’67 In her own hand, after ‘disappointed’, she inserted ‘and dismayed’. She went on:
My ability to help preserve the conditions in which an internal dialogue of the sort you are seeking has a chance of success will be critically, perhaps fatally, undermined … If you value my continuing help, I most strongly urge you not to [refuse to co-operate]. I do not think I could be plainer.
Confronted with this, Botha quickly capitulated, and agreed to see the EPG.
At the same time, Mrs Thatcher was hearing from intelligence sources that the South African government had talked directly to Mandela about his possible release. Despite her refusal personally to talk to the ANC so long as it espoused violence, she was perfectly happy that MI6 should do so secretly outside South Africa itself – in Lusaka, for instance, and in London.68 The ANC, the same sources said, would ‘call a halt to all violence’ if Mandela and all the imprisoned ANC leaders were released and the organization unbanned.69 In a letter to Mrs Thatcher on 14 December, Botha told her that he wanted to continue with reforms and ‘get moving with the negotiations … we are reconciled to the disappearance of white domination.’70 Cheered up by all this, Howe told her that Botha ‘obviously trusts you – you are perhaps the only Western leader in whom he feels he can confide.’71 He suggested she set up an ‘additional personal connection’ so that Botha could talk to someone ‘known to have your confidence’, but then spoilt it by suggesting Gordon Richardson, the ex-Governor of the Bank of England, who was her particular bête noire (see Volume I, p. 462). ‘She thinks that her card of entry to President Botha will decline in value’, Powell replied on her behalf, ‘if played too often; and she has other emissaries in mind whom she would prefer to use.’72 The main one she was thinking of was Leutwiler, but she did not wish to share this with her Foreign Secretary. Another reason that Mrs Thatcher liked Leutwiler was that he was close to Helmut Kohl and advised him informally on South African matters. She was always keen to cement the alliance with Kohl against economic sanctions.*
Another contact, seeing Botha under his own steam at this time, was Julian Amery.† Did she want him to give Botha a message, he asked her early in 1986. Mrs Thatcher did, and scribbled out what it should be:
The one L van der Post put to me – namely – he must get a majority against the extreme blacks by forming an alliance of
Whites
Indians
Coloureds
Zulus
S. African Swazis
Which together with some of the blacks they would carry with them, would give him a majority.73
This was a fair, if rough summation of how she wanted an internal settlement to come about.‡
In a major speech in January promising further reform, including a National Statutory Council for all races, Botha spoke publicly of the possibility of releasing Mandela. He put forward the suggestion that this could be a prisoner swap with a South African officer held in Angola and with the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky. This eccentric idea had come to him – via West Germans speaking to East Germans – from the Russians, as Mrs Thatcher was informed from reports.74 Perhaps part of the attraction of the scheme in Botha’s mind was that the deal would confirm that the ANC was a tool of the Soviets. Whether it would really have been such a brilliant thing for the West if the Soviet Union had won the release of black Africa’s greatest hero is something he seems not to have considered. Anyway, the ANC had little difficulty in refusing the offer.
Perhaps naively, Mrs Thatcher considered Botha’s speech ‘very courageous’,75 and was annoyed that the Foreign Office reaction was ‘rather wan’.76 She thought that Botha was moving away from old policies more decisively than was the case. Buthelezi announced that he would not join the new council, and P. W. Botha rebuked his own Foreign Minister, Pik, for saying that South Africa would one day have a black president. The international community remained unconvinced that real change was coming.
Some things were shifting, however. Lord Barber, for example, secretly relayed to the British government the news that Mandela, visited by an EPG colleague in prison, had said that he could work with Buthelezi if released, and had indicated that he wanted to give confidence to the white population.77 In March, the whole seven-man EPG met Mandela. During this encounter, he turned to Barber and said: ‘I am told Mrs Thatcher says President* Gorbachev is a man with whom she can do business. Will you please tell her that it would be far, far easier and very much safer to do business with Nelson Mandela.’78 It is not clear that the message reached her in those precise terms, but Barber reported its essence to her and Howe. He to
ld them that Mandela and Oliver Tambo† (whom he had also seen) would take part in negotiations with the South African government. The group’s meetings with South African ministers had also been good. That with Botha, however, had been a ‘disaster’,79 and Barber had concluded that the South African government did not envisage the full dismantling of apartheid. In that case, said Mrs Thatcher, it must change its position: ‘There must be at least the prospect of change within a defined period.’
Please, Barber therefore asked her, would she introduce the EPG’s ‘negotiating concept’ to Botha, who as yet knew nothing of it. The concept was that the South African government would end the state of emergency, withdraw troops from the townships, release Mandela and other ANC leaders and unban the ANC. In return, the ANC would agree to suspend violence and enter talks. Three days later, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Botha and to President Reagan to explain this scheme.* To Botha, she said that the EPG concept ‘offers a unique opportunity to make progress’.80 Without some movement, she would have no chance of persuading Commonwealth colleagues to stay their hand on sanctions. To this, Botha responded positively, tacitly dropping his demand for the absolute forswearing of violence. He sought assurances, however, that the EPG would recognize that he would have to use punitive measures if violence continued after Mandela’s release. He ‘has some reason’, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Powell on the face of his letter. ‘He could not stand by if violence erupted again.’81
Powell did not want his boss to become Botha’s intermediary with the EPG. He got her to write back saying that she could not ‘try to insert myself as an honest broker’82 between the two. She did add, however, that he could not ask for more than a ‘suspension’ of violence. She would support him if he took ‘reasonable security measures’, but the EPG could not give him a ‘blank cheque’. She also defended the ANC to him: ‘There is a readiness on their part to talk; but realistically they will need something they can show to their supporters to justify calling for a suspension of violence.’ After Botha had received this, the South African government duly sent an encouraging message to the EPG. Mrs Thatcher also warned Botha that ‘frustrated nationalism’ was the breeding ground for Communism. This was interestingly echoed, a couple of weeks later, by a report from Helen Suzman on visiting Mandela in prison. He had ‘stressed’, said Suzman, ‘that he was first and foremost a black African nationalist. He has said that he was not a Marxist.’83 Ten days later, Mandela told Barber that ‘he had no problem’ with the EPG’s negotiating concept and ‘would be willing to cooperate’.84 Irritated though she was by the pretensions of the Commonwealth, Mrs Thatcher was genuinely keen to push for the breakthrough their ‘concept’ sought.
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