* Four days later, freed since January from the constraints of ministerial office, Leon Brittan became the first senior Conservative to break with Mrs Thatcher and call publicly for the imposition of sanctions (Associated Press, 10 July 1986).
* It is hard to believe that van der Post’s version was wholly accurate, however. One of the recent controversial press pieces had been a long anonymous profile of the Prince of Wales in the Economist which contained a good deal of criticism of Mrs Thatcher. It was based, though it did not say so, on an interview with the Prince by the paper’s political editor Simon Jenkins. (Economist, 19 July 1986.)
* Andrew Neil (1949–), educated Paisley Grammar School and University of Glasgow; publisher, broadcaster and company chairman; editor, Sunday Times, 1983–94.
† Ingham had been informed because the Sunday Times had run the story past him.
* It was noted at the time that Willie Whitelaw, who had good royal connections, had been privately telling people that the Queen was worried about Mrs Thatcher’s policies and was ‘not unhappy that the story got out’ (Interview with Andrew Neil).
† In the short term, at least, Mrs Thatcher’s fears were probably justified. The monarchy, buoyed up by the popularity of Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson on 23 July, was a dangerous thing for an elected politician to fall foul of. An opinion poll in The Times on 1 August showed a sudden 9-point Labour lead; and the percentage thinking that the government was ‘not tough enough on the South African government’ had moved sharply up from 42 per cent to 56 per cent.
* Graham Turner remembered being ‘threatened’ by Ingham that, if he did not make the desired cuts, he would not be allowed to see Mrs Thatcher again. Ingham was as good as his word: Turner and Mrs Thatcher never met afterwards; but the tactic of ‘bullying’ annoyed Turner and made him dig his heels in. If he had been spoken to politely, he believed, he would have succumbed. (Interview with Graham Turner.)
* That October, overriding President Reagan’s veto, the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act imposing punitive sanctions on South Africa. According to Powell, rather than leading to a change of heart this only left Mrs Thatcher ‘more embattled’ (Interview with Lord Powell of Bayswater).
* Bernard Ingham, enclosing a copy of Geoffrey Howe’s letter, wrote to the present author saying: ‘I have not the slightest idea what he was on about. Nor have I any recollection that my offending briefing was raised with me. It would be remarkable if it had been because I briefed according to the line given to me after meetings I did not attend.’ (Correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 23 May 2012.)
† The games were boycotted by India and a number of the African and Caribbean nations whose governments were critical of Mrs Thatcher’s position on sanctions. The nations attending the games included Australia, Canada and New Zealand as well as two of the Frontline States, Botswana and Lesotho.
* There was a piquant, Yes Minister-style postscript to the review conference. In November 1986, Mrs Thatcher received a letter from Nigel Lawson in his role as master of the Mint. He said he wanted to strike a new 1-ounce gold coin called the Britannia, ‘following the virtual demise of the Krugerrand’. (Lawson to Thatcher, 3 November 1986, Prime Minister’s Papers, Economic Policy, The Coinage (document consulted in the Cabinet Office).) ‘I assume we buy the gold from South Africa,’ Mrs Thatcher inquired. Lawson replied that some of the gold probably would be South African. Geoffrey Howe wrote to Lawson to protest at this, given the Commonwealth ban. (Howe to Lawson, 17 December 1986. Ibid.) ‘I trust that there will be no Russian [underlined three times] gold in it?’ wrote Mrs Thatcher caustically. The Mint informed her that some of the gold probably would indeed be South African and some Russian. ‘Go ahead,’ instructed Mrs Thatcher, ‘– but I am at a loss for words! We can’t import Krugerrands so we are going to strike a new coin which may … contain S. African & Russian gold. What a policy!!’ (Norgrove to Thatcher, 3 November 1986. Ibid.)
* Howe’s behaviour over South Africa actually formed part of Mrs Thatcher’s charge-sheet against his leadership abilities. ‘Howe has not got the calibre to be Prime Minister,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt. ‘At the Commonwealth Conference [in Nassau] it was she who had to fight the … other countries over the South African sanctions. He was feeble.’ (Wyatt, The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, vol. i, 9 February 1986, p. 87.)
* Although it had never been ratified, both sides had previously agreed voluntarily to adhere to the limits laid down in the treaty.
* Under ‘flexible response’ NATO, if attacked, could draw on a range of options, beginning with conventional forces, but escalating to tactical nuclear weapons, intermediate missiles and ultimately strategic nuclear forces. This preserved the credibility of NATO’s nuclear deterrent by allowing the alliance to respond in kind to Soviet attacks of differing magnitudes.
† These included ‘strengthening and refining the ABM Treaty, extending the period of notice required for unilateral withdrawal from it and a commitment not to enter particular phases of defensive programmes before certain specified dates’ (Thatcher to Reagan, 11 February 1986, CAC: THCR 3/1/52).
* An NSC analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s suggestions cast doubt on whether a viable SDI research programme could really be sustained under the limitations she was proposing. Nonetheless, it grudgingly concluded that ‘When all the smoke clears, we may ultimately have to make some move in the general direction suggested by the PM.’ (‘Critique of PM Thatcher’s 11 Feb Letter’, Mrs Thatcher on SDI/ABM, March 1986 (1), Box 92083, Robert Linhard Files, Reagan Library.)
* The exact nature of the research, development and testing permitted by the ABM Treaty was a matter of great dispute between Washington and Moscow. Reagan’s letter ignored this controversy entirely.
* The day before receiving Powell’s recommendation, Mrs Thatcher had undergone the operation for Dupuytren’s contracture on her right hand, which was therefore bandaged. Powell drew square boxes on his own memo, so that all she had to do, with her left hand, was to tick the option she preferred. This, incidentally, was the usual manner in which Reagan responded to recommendations from his staff.
* There is no evidence that Mrs Thatcher herself knew that London had been suggested as the possible host for the summit. If she had, she would surely have moved heaven and earth to get it. Charles Powell knew, but did not believe that the Americans were seriously contemplating it, and so did not tell her. (Interview with Lord Powell of Bayswater.) If she had succeeded in sitting in on the meeting, the proceedings would certainly have been different.
† Bernard Ingham was pleased with the timing: ‘Reagan/Gorbachev well covered and eclipses Labour Party Conference,’ he told Mrs Thatcher (‘Press Digest’, Ingham to Thatcher, 1 October 1986, CAC: THCR 3/5/61).
* Eduard Shevardnadze (1928–2014), First Secretary, Communist Party Central Committee, Georgia, 1972–85; member, Politburo, 1985–90; Minister of Foreign Affairs, USSR, 1985–90; founder, Movement for Democratic Reform, 1991; Chairman of Supreme Council and Head of State, Georgia, 1992–5; President of Georgia, 1995–2003; Hon. GCMG, 2000.
* At this stage it was suggested that the Soviets would keep 100 missiles in Asia and the US 100 in Alaska.
* One exception was Don Regan, the President’s Chief of Staff, who let the truth slip when he briefed the press immediately after the summit. ‘We said to the Soviets, we will do away with all nuclear weapons …’ he declared. ‘Everything was on the table.’ (Washington Post, 13 October 1986.)
* Charles Clarke (1950–), educated Highgate School and King’s College, Cambridge; head, office of Neil Kinnock, MP, 1981–92; Labour MP for Norwich South, 1997–2010; Minister without Portfolio and Chairman of the Labour Party, 2001–2; Secretary of State for Education and Skills, 2002–4; Home Secretary, 2004–6.
* The word ‘Contra’ was added when it later came out that money from these sales was diverted to arming the Contra troops against the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragu
a.
* Geoffrey Howe remained unhappy that Mrs Thatcher might be allowing Reagan too much leeway for developing SDI. A letter from his private office to Charles Powell argued that what she had said about SDI research had been ‘merely stating a common sense fact’ and should be expanded. (Budd to Powell, 20 November 1986, Prime Minister’s Papers, Defence, Military Uses of Laser Technology in Space, Part 4 (document consulted in the Cabinet Office).) Mrs Thatcher scrawled on top: ‘I do not accept that the common sense meaning of words should play no part in foreign policy.’
* In the Washington Post of 18 November, Kissinger wrote that ‘the Reykjavik edifice puts the entire postwar structure of deterrence into question because it makes it even more doubtful that the United States would use nuclear weapons in defense of its allies’ (Washington Post, 18 November 1986).
† Mrs Thatcher strongly endeared herself to Reagan at this time by the moral support she gave him. In early December, she sent him, by private means, a handwritten letter of solidarity: ‘The press and media are always so ready to criticise and get people down. I know what it’s like. But your achievements in restoring America’s pride and confidence and in giving the West the leadership it needs are far too substantial to suffer any lasting damage. The message I give to everyone is that anything which weakens you, weakens America; and anything that weakens America weakens the whole free world.’ (Thatcher to Reagan, 4 December 1986, Presidential Handwriting File, Folder 169, Reagan Library.)
* Those making the final cut were Charles Powell and Percy Cradock (Mrs Thatcher’s office), Bryan Cartledge and David Ratford (Foreign Office) and Martin Nicholson (Cabinet Office).
† Christopher Mallaby (1936–), educated Eton and King’s College, Cambridge; Head of Arms Control, Soviet and Eastern European Planning Departments, FCO, 1977–82; Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, 1985–8; Ambassador to West Germany, 1988–92; to France, 1993–6; knighted, 1988.
* Powell’s record suggests that these conclusions ‘seemed to command broad assent’, but they clearly tilted towards the views of the sceptical majority. The divisions between the two camps remained too great to permit the emergence of a consensus.
† Archie Brown, whose comments on the next generation of Soviet leaders had attracted Mrs Thatcher’s attention during the 1983 Chequers seminar, proved too much of an ‘enthusiast’ for her taste on this occasion. ‘I’m not asking him again,’ she told Robert Conquest afterwards. (Interview with Robert Conquest.)
* The hairbrushes seem, nevertheless, to have been presented.
* While Mrs Thatcher was the first Western leader to forge a relationship with Gorbachev, Kohl was one of the last. In October 1986, the German leader had caused much offence in Moscow by drawing parallels between Gorbachev and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Kohl was not granted a meeting with the Soviet leader until the autumn of 1988 (see Archie Brown, The Myth of the Strong Leader, Bodley Head, 2014, pp. 136–7).
* Scholars who were cynical about Gorbachev’s reforms liked to point out that glasnost really meant not ‘openness’ but ‘publicity’.
† Mrs Thatcher remembered that the supermarket was ‘the most sparse for goods which I had ever seen in my life, there were one or two bits of bacon, very fat but not much, and there was some fish and some tinned fish and there was a little bit of chocolate. I had taken quite a lot of chocolate with me and I left some for the children.’ (Thatcher Memoirs Materials, CAC: THCR 4/3.)
* Amanda Ponsonby recalled hurrying round with a change of shoes and a hairbrush to get her ready (Interview with Amanda Ponsonby).
* Chernyaev, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man, encouraged Gorbachev to build a close relationship with Mrs Thatcher. He himself not only admired Mrs Thatcher but, according to his private diary, harboured sexual fantasies about her. (Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, 16 September 1989, National Security Archive.)
† In explicitly referring to the Brezhnev Doctrine, she was taking up a suggestion of Robert Conquest (‘A Note on Our Relations with Moscow: March 1987’, CAC: THCR 1/10/113). This doctrine held that efforts to introduce capitalism into socialist countries were a problem for the entire socialist bloc, not merely for the country concerned. Such reforms would be resisted, if necessary through force.
* By the early twenty-first century, 1 billion bytes was roughly a fifth of the capacity of a typical DVD.
† President Reagan had first branded the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ in his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in March 1983 (see Volume I, p. 565).
* The exception was a brief passage of arms in which Gorbachev criticized Mrs Thatcher over the Falklands and she replied that ‘that was not a very wise remark’ (Powell to Galsworthy, 30 March 1987, Prime Minister’s Papers, Soviet Union, Prime Minister’s Visit to the Soviet Union, Part 1 (document consulted in the Cabinet Office)).
† An earlier draft of the speech, addressing Mrs Thatcher’s first meeting with Gorbachev in 1984, included the line: ‘we were subsequently very pleased with ourselves for having spotted a winner.’ While this accurately reflected Mrs Thatcher’s feelings, the sentence was cut out of fear that it would appear ‘patronising’. (Parker to Powell, 20 March 1987, CAC: THCR 5/1/5/549.)
* Julian Barnes (1946–), educated City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford; author of many novels, essays and short stories; winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011).
† Dennis Potter (1935–94), educated Bell’s Grammar School, Coleford, St Clement Danes Grammar School, London and New College, Oxford; television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist; contested (Labour) East Herts, 1964; his works include a semi-autobiographical play, Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965), and The Singing Detective (1986).
‡ David Hare (1947–), educated Lancing and Jesus College, Cambridge; playwright; his plays include Plenty (1978) and Racing Demon (1990); knighted, 1998.
* Hanif Kureishi (1954–), educated King’s College London; author of novels, short stories, screenplays and plays; his novel The Buddha of Suburbia won the Whitbread Prize for best first novel in 1990; his film scripts include My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
† Jonathan Raban (1942–), educated University of Hull; essayist, travel writer and novelist; publications include God, Man & Mrs Thatcher (1989), a critical analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.
‡ (Helen) Mary Warnock (1924–), educated St Swithun’s, Winchester and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; headmistress, Oxford High School, 1966–72; Talbot Resident Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1972–6; Resident Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 1976–84; Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, 1985–91; member, Independent Broadcasting Authority, 1973–81; chairman, Committee of Inquiry into Special Education, 1974–8; chairman, Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization, 1982–4; created Lady Warnock, 1985.
* Mary Warnock and others complained afterwards about the selection of quotations used in the Sunday Telegraph interview: some of them, they said, had made more favourable remarks about Mrs Thatcher which were not included in the published text.
† Jonathan Miller (1934–), educated St Paul’s and St John’s College, Cambridge; writer, academic, broadcaster and director of numerous plays, operas, films and TV programmes; Fellow, University College London, 1981–; knighted, 2002.
‡ Despite Bennett’s doubts, Mrs Thatcher had a genuine taste for poetry – especially Tennyson and Kipling – though not avant-garde poetry, and knew a good deal by heart. One reason that Denis Thatcher decided to propose to her was that, when he visited her once in her flat and quoted a line of verse, she capped the quotation and recited the whole poem. Unfortunately, he could not remember, in later years, which poem it was.(Interview with Sir Denis Thatcher.) In general, Mrs Thatcher was never attracted by the avant-garde in the arts, and knew little about it. One day, at a meeting, she described something as being like ‘Waiting for Godot’, sounding the t in
Godot. Lord Carrington whispered to her, ‘It’s pronounced Godo, Prime Minister.’ ‘How is it spelt?’ she asked him sharply. He explained. ‘Then it’s Godot,’ she insisted, sounding the t harder than ever. (Interview with Clare Pakenham.)
§ If Bennett really thought the line is about an open mind in the sense which he meant it, it was Mrs Thatcher who, to use other words from the poem, was the ‘less deceived’. Larkin’s image of the rape victim’s mind lying open like a drawer of knives has nothing to do with free thought. It is an image of pure pain, echoing one of George Herbert’s ‘Affliction’ poems: ‘My thoughts are all a case of knives / Wounding my heart.’
* Anthony Burgess (1917–93), educated Xaverian College, Manchester and Manchester University; academic, author, critic and composer; novels include A Clockwork Orange (1962), Earthly Powers (1980).
† ‘Kettling’ refers to a method of crowd control whereby the police confine protesters to a small area.
‡ The sequence of Labour governments which came to power in that year and continued until 2010 in fact did almost nothing to ‘take back’ any privatization.
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