What infuriated her was that no one bothered to argue with her. Giscard ostentatiously read a newspaper, while Schmidt pretended to go to sleep. This was perhaps inexcusable, though they for their part felt provoked by her aggressive insensitivity. But it was not only the big players that she antagonised. For good measure she gratuitously ‘upbraided… the little countries for their pusillanimous attitude’ to nuclear weapons.47 There was only one flash of light relief. In the middle of a tirade about ‘my oil’ and ‘my fish’, she exclaimed ‘My God’, at which someone audibly interjected, ‘Oh, not that too!’48
The next morning she continued ‘banging away’ at the same points, still getting nowhere, before Jenkins and Carrington took her aside and persuaded her to agree to a postponement on the basis – ‘the words coming out of her with almost physical difficulty’ – ‘that she would approach the next meeting at Luxembourg in April in a spirit of genuine compromise’.49
Back in the Commons she was constantly under pressure from both Labour and Tory anti-Europeans to leave the Community altogether. But that was an option she refused to countenance. She certainly felt no emotional or visionary commitment to the idea of Europe; and the more she saw of its institutions in practice, the less respect she felt for them. She regarded it as an organisation founded upon compromise and horse-trading, which she despised. Nevertheless she still accepted without question, as she had done since Macmillan’s first application in 1961, that Britain’s place was in the Community. When pressed, however, she always tended to justify membership in the context of her overriding preoccupation with defence. In his first conversation with her after the election Roy Jenkins was disconcerted to find her ‘thinking always a little too much in terms of the EEC and NATO as two bodies which ought to be amalgamated’.50 Nine months later she was happy to agree with a friendly questioner in the Commons that ‘Europe needs to be united, and to stay united as a free Europe against the unfree part of Europe which is bound by bonds of steel around the Soviet Union’.51 The Cold War set the framework of her thinking.
On this basis she started out moderately pro-European. In her speech to the Tory Party Conference just before Dublin she promised to fight Britain’s corner as a committed member of the Community, asserting that it was ‘no good joining anything half-heartedly’.52 She was happy to acknowledge that there were lessons Britain could profitably learn from Europe: ‘If we want a German and French standard of living we must have a German and French standard of work.’53 Or again: ‘There are many Continental practices that one would like to assume in this country, including the Continentals’ tendency not to spend money that they have not got.’54 But the budget dispute quickly brought out her instinctive underlying hostility to Europe and an unpleasant streak of contempt for the Europeans. ‘They are all a rotten lot,’ she told Roy Jenkins just before Dublin, couching her scorn as usual in terms of defence. ‘Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only ones who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.’55 Her belief in the essential superiority of the British was founded on two ideas. First, her memory of the war, when most of continental Europe had been overrun and occupied and had to be liberated by Britain (and the Americans). ‘We,’ she once exclaimed, ‘who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free when otherwise it would have been in chains…’56 The idea that the Europeans were not permanently grateful to Britain – as she was to the Americans – never ceased to offend her. Second, she contrived to believe that the sense of justice was an essentially British (or, more specifically, English) characteristic which foreigners did not understand. ‘There’s not a strand of equity or fairness in Europe,’ she declared in her television memoirs. ‘They’re out to get as much as they can, that’s one of those enormous differences.’57
The next European Council met in Luxembourg in April 1980. This time Britain was offered a rebate of £700 million a year, roughly two-thirds of the disputed loaf, which Jenkins regarded as ‘a very favourable offer’. ‘To almost universal amazement’, however, Mrs Thatcher again rejected it.58 She was ‘much quieter, less strident, less abrasive than at Dublin’, but still adamant. When Jenkins told her she was making a great mistake, ‘she good-humouredly but firmly said “Don’t try persuading me, you know I find persuasion very counterproductive.”’59 The French Commissioner, Claude Cheysson, sensed that Mrs Thatcher positively relished her isolation. ‘Not only didn’t she mind about it,’ he recalled, ‘but she was pleased with that. She was very anxious that Britain would be Britain, and Britain needed no ally. Britain could stand on its own.’60 Long before the Falklands she was already striking Churchillian poses.
Faced with another impasse at heads of government level, the Commission now dressed up ‘approximately the same deal in somewhat different form’ – still only a two-thirds refund but extended for the next three years – to present to the council of foreign ministers the next month in Brussels. On their own responsibility Carrington and Gilmour accepted this, and thought they had done well. Carrington, in Jenkins’ view, ‘showed himself a more skilful and sensible negotiator than his head of government. He knew when to settle. She did not.’61 The Foreign Secretary and his deputy then flew back to Britain and drove straight to Chequers, feeling pleased with themselves. But if they expected congratulation they were swiftly disillusioned. ‘My immediate reaction,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘was far from favourable.’62 ‘Had we been bailiffs arriving to take possession of the furniture,’ Gilmour wrote, ‘we would probably have been more cordially received. The Prime Minister was like a firework whose fuse had already been lit; we could almost hear the sizzling.’ Without even offering them the drink they were dying for, she bombarded them with ‘an interminable barrage of irrelevance’, accusing them of selling the country down the river, vowing to resign rather than accept it.63 Eventually they escaped back to London, where Gilmour ignored the Prime Minister’s reaction and briefed journalists that they had secured a diplomatic triumph. The next day’s papers duly hailed a great victory for her tough tactics. Temporarily outmanoeuvred, Mrs Thatcher was forced to swallow her objections and accept the deal, consoling herself that if not the end of the matter, it represented ‘huge progress from the position the Government had inherited’.64
‘Her objection,’ Gilmour believed, ‘was to the fact of the agreement, not its terms. That was not because we had succeeded where she had failed. It was because, to her, the grievance was more valuable than its solution.’65 There is no doubt that the dispute was a godsend to her in her first year, providing what she always needed, an external enemy against whom to vent her aggression and prove her mettle. Greedy foreigners trying to get their hands on Britain’s money offered the perfect outlet for patriotic indignation, a priceless distraction as inflation continued to rise and unemployment began to mount alarmingly. The EC budget battle set the style of her premiership and fixed the tabloid image of battling Maggie swinging her handbag and standing up for Britain against the wiles of Brussels. For the moment she was obliged to make the best of the interim settlement Carrington had secured, while still holding out for a permanent solution, which was not finally achieved until the Fontainebleau council of June 1984. Until then the ‘Bloody British Question’, as it was known in Brussels, continued to paralyse all other progress in the Community and poison Britain’s relationship with Europe.
She won in the end when two new leaders, François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany, realised that they would get no peace till Mrs Thatcher got what she demanded. But her victory was achieved at a considerable cost. First, however much she claimed to be a full and equal member, her exclusive preoccupation with the budget prevented Britain playing a full role in the development of the Community, thus confirming the dismal pattern of critical semi-detachment already set by Labour. Second, Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic rhetoric, gleefully amplified by the Sun and the Daily Mail, set a tone of popular prejudice, hostile to the Community and all its works, which endured l
ong after the budget problem was resolved. Third, the ultimate success of her uncompromising campaign encouraged Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that intransigence was the only language foreigners understood. ‘The outcome,’ Nigel Lawson observed, ‘persuaded her that it always paid to be bloody-minded in dealings with the Community. This was to prove increasingly counterproductive in practice.’66
In this way she began to undermine the Tory commitment to Europe which she had inherited from Macmillan and Heath, leading within ten years to a deep split in the party which would eventually destroy her and bedevil the life of her successors.As Roy Jenkins wrote, ‘It was a heavy price to pay for 400 million ecus.’67
Rhodesia into Zimbabwe
The long-running problem of ending colonial rule in Rhodesia, by contrast, was a subject on which Mrs Thatcher, very soon after taking office, dramatically changed her mind and modified her initial instinct, leading to a settlement which reflected her flexibility and pragmatism. Unlike Europe or the Cold War, Rhodesia was not an issue with which she felt any visceral involvement. Her sympathies were instinctively with the white settlers – ‘our kith and kin’, as the British press liked to call them. Denis had business connections with Rhodesia, and she could not forget that Ian Smith, the rebel Prime Minister, had served in the RAF during the war. The African leaders, by contrast, she regarded as Communist-sponsored terrorists. Nevertheless Rhodesia was marginal to her central concerns, a tiresome responsibility which she simply wanted to dispose of honourably.
Ten years after Smith’s illegal declaration of independence from Britain, it was the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Angola and Mozambique in 1975 which spelled the end of the line for rebel Rhodesia. As the two rival African guerrilla groups, ZIPRA and ZANU, led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, stepped up their military incursions from neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, South Africa decided it could no longer go on shoring up its northern satellite and began to put pressure on Smith to bow to the inevitable and accept majority rule. In 1977 Smith rejected an Anglo-American peace plan put forward by David Owen and the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and negotiated his own internal settlement – heavily favourable to the whites – with the more accommodating Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Callaghan and Owen – and Carter – immediately declared it unacceptable and refused to recognise it.
Mrs Thatcher’s instinct was to support the Smith/Muzorewa settlement, and this remained her position up to the General Election. In April she sent the former Colonial Secretary Lord Boyd to observe the Rhodesian elections for the Tory party. Bishop Muzorewa won and duly became the country’s first black Prime Minister at the head of a power-sharing government. But with Nkomo and Mugabe (now allied as the Patriotic Front) boycotting the elections, most international opinion declared them meaningless. Boyd, however, declared them fair and valid, and Mrs Thatcher accepted his report. In her first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister she warmly welcomed the elections as marking a ‘major change’ and promised to build on them.68 Six weeks later, stopping off in Canberra on her way back from the Tokyo summit at the end of June, she again hinted that Britain would recognise Muzorewa, provoking a storm of protest led by the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who warned her that she was isolating herself from the rest of the Commonwealth, and indeed the world. President Carter had already rejected the result of the elections and announced – in defiance of Congress, which voted to lift them – that American sanctions against Rhodesia would be maintained.
On her return to Britain, Carrington persuaded her to change her mind. Recognition of Muzorewa, he argued, would not only split both the Commonwealth and the Atlantic alliance, boost Soviet influence in Africa and damage Britain economically; it was also futile, since the internal settlement would not end the war in Rhodesia, but only widen it, with the Soviet Union backing Nkomo and China backing Mugabe. Britain would be left holding nominal responsibility before the United Nations for an escalating conflict. As Lady Thatcher subsequently wrote in her memoirs: ‘Unpleasant realities had to be faced… He turned out to be right.’69
She also found other grounds to change her mind. She was persuaded that there were legal flaws in Smith’s gerrymandered constitution, which was unlike any other that Britain had bequeathed her former colonies. Strict regard for legality was something Mrs Thatcher always took very seriously. In addition, following the failure of the Vance – Owen initiative, she liked the idea of Britain going it alone to achieve a settlement without American help. ‘How do we decolonise a colony when there is no problem at all?’ she asked her advisers. ‘We get all the parties round a table at Lancaster House,’ they replied. ‘They work out a constitution that suits them all; then they have an election on that constitution and that’s goodbye.’ Very well, she concluded, ‘Let’s go down that road and see what happens.’70
For all these reasons – though not without a last-minute wobble when she appeared to go cold on the whole idea – Mrs Thatcher had made up her mind before she flew to Lusaka for the Commonwealth Conference in August that the only solution lay in a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties. She actually signalled her shift of view in the House of Commons on 25 July, when the Foreign Office succeeded in writing into her speech a carefully phrased statement that any settlement must be internationally recognised. But scarcely anyone noticed the significance of her words: it is not certain that she fully recognised it herself.71 Carrington insists that she had determined what she wanted to achieve before she went to Lusaka. But it was still generally assumed that she would be walking into a lions’ den, setting herself against the united view of the rest of the Commonwealth. She was certainly prepared for a hostile reception.
Though Denis had travelled extensively in Africa, Mrs Thatcher had no connection with either the old or the new Commonwealth; nor – unlike Callaghan orWilson – did she feel any political sympathy with Africa’s liberation struggle. On the contrary, like Ted Heath, she found the hypocrisy of the African leaders preaching democracy for others while operating one-party states themselves, reviling Britain one moment while demanding increased aid the next, very hard to swallow.Yet she did not want to see the club break up; and in practice, once exposed to them privately in the relaxed atmosphere of a Commonwealth Conference, she discovered most of the African leaders to be much more agreeable and a good deal less ‘Marxist’ than she had expected.72 In particular, as Carrington noted, she ‘blossomed in the warmth of Kenneth Kaunda’s friendly personality’. 73 At Lusaka she even scored a memorable diplomatic coup by dancing with him: since her Oxford days she had been an excellent dancer, and the resulting photographs did more than any diplomatic communiqué to dissolve tensions.
Much of the credit for the success of Lusaka has been given to the Queen for helping to create the family atmosphere in which Mrs Thatcher and President Kaunda were able to overcome their mutual suspicion.74 But at least as much is due to Mrs Thatcher herself, first for allowing Carrington to change her mind on the central issue and then, having changed it, for her determination to hammer out – with Malcolm Fraser, Michael Manley (of Jamaica) and the Commonwealth Secretary-General Sonny Ramphal – the lines of an agreement which could bring Mugabe and Nkomo to Lancaster House. Carrington paid tribute to the skill with which she exploited the element of surprise at her unexpected reversal. Always concerned to get the legal framework right, she insisted that Rhodesia must first return to its constitutional status as a colony, with the appointment of a new Governor and all the flummery of British rule. In return she agreed that Britain would send troops to enforce and monitor the ceasefire. This was a risk which Callaghan had not been prepared to take. But Mrs Thatcher accepted that Britain had a responsibility to discharge; she was determined not to have the United Nations involved.75 More than anything else it was this guarantee of British military commitment which persuaded the Patriotic Front to lay down its arms. By the concerted pressure of South Africa, the neighbouring ‘Front Line’ states, the rest of the Commonwealth and the
United States, all parties to the conflict were cajoled into agreeing to attend peace talks in London in September.
Carrington still had no great hopes of a settlement. But for fifteen weeks he put the whole weight of the Foreign Office into the effort to achieve one, believing that his tenure would not last long if he failed.76 Having played her part at Lusaka, Mrs Thatcher left her Foreign Secretary to chair the talks with minimum interference.While Kaunda flew to London to impress on Nkomo that he must settle, and Samora Machel of Mozambique similarly leaned on Mugabe, Mrs Thatcher’s role behind the scenes was to make plain to the whites that they could not look to Britain to bail them out. The negotiations were tense and protracted – a walkout by one or other party was never far away; but an agreement was eventually signed just before Christmas, providing for elections in the New Year, a ten-year embargo on the transfer of land and British help in forging a united army out of the previously warring forces. Christopher Soames was appointed Governor to oversee the elections and bring the new state of Zimbabwe to independence.
Mrs Thatcher would frankly have preferred that the Marxist Mugabe had not won the elections. Right up to the last moment, diehard whites still hoped that she would declare the result invalid. But she refused to do so, and firmly quashed any thought that she might recognise a military coup. She was their last hope, and when she spelled out the reality they knew the game was up. Mugabe’s victory was in fact the best possible outcome, since winning power through the ballot box served – at least in the short term – to de-radicalise the Patriotic Front. Once in power, Mugabe quickly declared Zimbabwe a one-party state; but for the best part of twenty years it seemed a relatively successful one. Only at the end of the century did the issue of the unequal ownership of land – shelved at Lancaster House – erupt in Government-sponsored violence against white farmers as the ageing dictator clung to office, wrecking the country’s once-prosperous economy and throwing its multiracial future into doubt.77
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