16
Iron Lady I: Special Relationships
Mrs Thatcher and the Foreign Office
BY the time she embarked on her second term in June 1983, Mrs Thatcher was far more confident in foreign affairs than she had been in 1979. Then she had been the new girl on the international block, admittedly inexperienced and up against established leaders at the head of all her major allies: Jimmy Carter in Washington, Helmut Schmidt in Bonn and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in Paris. But already by October 1982 – when Schmidt was replaced by Helmut Kohl – she was boasting in her constituency that she was now the most senior Western leader.1 (She did not count Pierre Trudeau, who had been Prime Minister of Canada on and off since 1968.) The longer she remained in office, the more she was able to exploit what she called in her memoirs the ‘huge and cumulative advantage in simply being known both by politicians and by ordinary people around the world’.2 She had scored a notable diplomatic success in Zimbabwe, partial victory on the European budget issue and above all a stunning military triumph in the Falklands. Before the Paras had even landed in San Carlos Bay she was proclaiming, in refutation of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe that Britain had ‘lost an empire and not yet found a role’: ‘I believe Britain has now found a role. It is in upholding international law and teaching the nations of the world how to live.’3 Once the war was won there was no holding her belief that Britain was once again a model to the world.
From now on she travelled extensively and was royally received wherever she went; she milked her global celebrity to the full. But she always travelled with a purpose, to promote her views and British interests, not just to inform herself as she had done in opposition. Wherever she went she exploited the Falklands triumph as a symbol of Britain’s rebirth under her leadership, her resolution in the cause of freedom, and proven military prowess. ‘Better than any Prime Minister since Macmillan,’ David Reynolds has written, ‘she understood that prestige was a form of power.’4 Every foreign leader who came to London, however insignificant, wanted to be photographed with Madame Thatcher to boost his prestige back home. She posed with them all in front of the fireplace in the entrance hall of Number Ten, and sent them away with a lecture about the free market or the need to combat Communism.[h]
Like all long-serving Prime Ministers, she increasingly wished to be her own Foreign Secretary. She quickly replaced Francis Pym with the more amenable Geoffrey Howe, then treated Howe as little more than her bag carrier, entrusted with the tiresome detail of diplomacy while she handled all the important conversations. She liked dealing directly with the heads of government but had no inhibitions about receiving their foreign ministers or lesser emissaries and thoroughly enjoyed subjecting them to the same sort of interrogation she gave her own ministers: few of them came up to scratch. As Charles Powell put it: ‘She was ready to go toe-to-toe with any world leader from Gorbachev to Deng Xiaoping… She had the huge advantage of being unembarrassable.’6 As a woman she could say things to foreign leaders – most of whom had little experience of female politicians – that no male Prime Minister could have got away with.7
Howe and Mrs Thatcher made an excellent partnership precisely because he was the perfect foil to her rampaging style. She positively prided herself on being undiplomatic; but for that very reason she needed him to smooth ruffled feathers and mend broken fences in her wake. In truth she resented the fact that the policies she followed were very often closer to Foreign Office advice than her rhetoric implied. Howe deserves as much of the credit for her foreign policy successes in the second term as he does for holding firm at the Treasury in the first.
Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that the Foreign Office – officially the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – was a limp institution dedicated to giving away Britain’s vital interests had only been reinforced by her experience since 1979. After the Falklands war she appointed Sir Anthony Parsons, fresh from his brilliant performance at the UN, to be her private foreign-policy adviser in Number Ten. A large part of Parsons’ job, as he described it, was to try to anticipate crises, so that she would not be ‘caught short again as she had been over the Falklands’.8 He stayed for only a year, but was replaced by Sir Percy Cradock, a China specialist who initially handled the Hong Kong negotiations but stayed on to become her general foreign-policy adviser right up to 1990.
Increasingly she travelled with no Foreign Office presence in her party at all, but was accompanied even on important trips only by her own private entourage. When she first visited President Reagan in 1981, for example, she took with her a whole phalanx of senior mandarins and several juniors. By the time she flew right round the world from Beijing and Hong Kong to bend the President’s ear about his ‘Star Wars’ programme in December 1984 she was accompanied only by her two private secretaries, Robin Butler and Charles Powell, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. And towards the end it was usually just Powell and Ingham.
She continued to seek foreign-policy advice from independent academic experts outside the Foreign Office. Though to an extent these tended to tell her what she wanted to hear – or, more accurately, she chose advisers who would tell her what she wanted to hear – it is to her credit that she tried to go beyond the narrow circle of official advice. Nevertheless both her special advisers, Parsons and Cradock, were former FCO insiders; and the most influential of all from 1984 onwards – Charles Powell – was, ironically, a Foreign Office man par excellence.
A career diplomat in his early forties, Powell succeeded John Coles as Mrs Thatcher’s foreign-affairs private secretary in June 1984 and immediately established an exceptional rapport with her. The basis of their relationship was his skill at drafting: he was brilliant at finding acceptable diplomatic language to express what she wanted to say without fudging it. Second, he needed as little sleep as she did: he was unflagging and ever-present, never went to bed but seemed to be always at her side. In addition, he had a knack of getting things done by informal personal diplomacy of his own: he would go direct to Washington or Paris, behind the back of the official Foreign Office, and fix what she wanted with a word in the right place. He came to be seen as the second most powerful figure in the Government, no longer confined exclusively to foreign affairs but the real deputy Prime Minister, practically her alter ego. ‘It was sometimes difficult,’ Cradock wrote, ‘to establish where Mrs Thatcher ended and Charles Powell began.’9
After three or four years, by normal Whitehall practice it would have been time for Powell to move on, but Mrs Thatcher refused to let him go. This might not have mattered if he had been just an indispensable Jeeves. But, in fact, the longer he stayed the more his views began to influence Mrs Thatcher’s. Whereas in the earlier years of her premiership Mrs Thatcher was surrounded by overwhelmingly pro-European advice, from about 1986 Powell’s informed and articulate Euroscepticism increasingly encouraged her to follow her own anti-Community and anti-German prejudice – with serious consequences both for herself and for Britain.
For most of her premiership, however, she actually followed Foreign Office advice far more than she liked to pretend – on Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe and even during her second term on the EC. Though she went to war for the Falklands, she liquidated most of the last vestiges of empire around the world; though famously hostile to Communism, she was persuaded that she could do business with a new generation of Soviet leaders; though an instinctive Unionist, she was likewise persuaded that the only chance of peace in Northern Ireland was with the involvement of Dublin; and against her instinct she took the decisive steps in committing Britain to an integrated Europe.
Judged by the objectives she set herself, she was ‘hugely successful’ in foreign affairs.10 First, she played Ronald Reagan skilfully to revive and maximise the US ‘special relationship’; then she spotted and encouraged Mikhail Gorbachev, and acted successfully as an intermediary between him and Reagan. She finally settled the EC budget row and went on to set the pace in promoting the introduction of a s
ingle European market. She achieved as good a settlement as could be hoped for in Hong Kong. She defied the world by pursuing her own route to ending apartheid in South Africa and arguably was vindicated by the result. And despite her strongly expressed views, she managed to maintain good relations with almost everyone, not only the leaders of both superpowers, but on both sides of the Jordan and the Limpopo too. In short, one recent history concludes, she ‘utterly transformed Britain’s standing and reputation in the world’.11
Ron and Margaret
The unshakeable cornerstone of Mrs Thatcher’s foreign policy was the United States. She had no time for subtle formulations which saw Britain as the meeting point of overlapping circles of influence, maintaining a careful equidistance between America on the one hand and Europe on the other, with obligations to the Commonwealth somewhere in the background. She had no doubt whatever that Britain’s primary role in the world was as Washington’s number-one ally. No Prime Minister since Churchill had believed so unquestioningly in the mission of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ to lead and save the rest of the world. But she had no illusions about who was the senior partner, nor did she seek to deny the reality of British dependence on the United States. It was the Americans – with British help – who had liberated Europe from the Nazi tyranny in 1944; it was American nuclear protection which had defended Western Europe from Soviet aggression since 1945. ‘Had it not been for the magnanimity of the United States, Europe would not be free today,’ she reminded the Tory Party Conference in 1981 (and repeated on innumerable other occasions). ‘We cannot defend ourselves, either in this island or in Europe, without a close, effective and warmhearted alliance with the United States.’12
Moreover, she increasingly believed that it was not just America’s military might that underwrote the survival of freedom in the West, but American capitalism, which was the pre-eminent model of that freedom. Nothing made her angrier than the condescension of the British political establishment which viewed America as crude, refreshingly vigorous but sadly naive. She envied the energy and optimism of American society – the unapologetic belief in capitalism and the refusal to look to the state for the solution to every social problem – and wanted Britain to become in every respect (from penal policy to the funding of the arts) more American. She was herself, as one US Ambassador in London shrewdly noted, a very American type of politician: patriotic, evangelical, unafraid of big abstract words, preaching a message of national and even personal salvation quite unlike the usual British (and European) style of ironic scepticism and fatalistic damage limitation.13 Proud as she was of Britain’s glorious past, at the end of the twentieth century a part of her would really rather have been American. Her entourage felt the almost physical charge she got whenever she visited America. ‘When she stepped onto American soil she became a new woman,’ Ronnie Millar noted. ‘She loved America… and America loved her back. There is nothing like the chemistry of mutual admiration.’14
She was distressed and angered by the overt anti-Americanism of British liberals who professed to see little difference between the Americans and the Russians, or nuclear disarmers who painted the United States as a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. There was no group she more passionately despised than academics who abused their personal freedom by equating Tyranny and Freedom. Her world view was uncomplicatedly black and white. ‘This party is pro-American,’ she declared roundly at the 1984 Tory Party Conference.15 Whatever differences she might have with the Americans on specific issues, she was determined to demonstrate on every occasion Britain’s unqualified loyalty to the Atlantic alliance. If she could not be the leader of the free world herself, the next best thing was to be his first lieutenant.
Just as she was lucky in her enemies, Mrs Thatcher was extraordinarily fortunate to coincide for most of her eleven years in Downing Street with an American President who allowed her to play a bigger role within the Alliance than any other Prime Minister since the days of Roosevelt and Churchill. During her first year and a half in office she tried hard to cultivate a good relationship with Jimmy Carter. Deeply as she revered his office, however, she enjoyed no rapport with the well-meaning but in her view hopelessly woolly-minded Democrat. The election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980, by contrast, changed everything. It was not just that Reagan was an ideological soulmate, elected on the same sort of conservative backlash that had brought her to power in Britain. Ideological symmetry does not guarantee a good relationship: it can just as easily make for rivalry. Far more important than the similarity of their ideas was the difference in their political personalities.
Temperamentally Reagan was Mrs Thatcher’s opposite, an easygoing, broad-brush politician who made no pretence of mastering the detailed complexities of policy, but was happy to let others – including on occasion Mrs Thatcher – lead and even bully him. The bond of their instinctively shared values was reinforced by sexual chemistry: he had an old-fashioned gallantry towards women, while she had a weakness for tall, charming men (particularly older men) with film-star looks. Out of his depth with most foreign leaders, Reagan knew where he was with Mrs Thatcher, if only because she spoke his language: he understood her, liked her, admired her and therefore trusted her. Unlike Helmut Schmidt, he did not feel threatened in his ‘male pride’ by a strong woman: as Americans often remarked, Margaret Thatcher held no terrors for a man who had been married for thirty years to Nancy Davis. For a politician, Reagan was unusually secure in his own skin. Unlike Mrs Thatcher he did not have to win every argument: he knew what he believed, but shrank from confrontation. Once when she was hectoring him down the telephone from London, he held the receiver away from his ear so that everyone in the room could hear her in full flow, beamed broadly and announced: ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’16 Their contrasting styles served to disguise the disparity in power between Washington and London and for eight years made something approaching reality of the comforting myth of a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States.
Mrs Thatcher exploited her opportunity with great skill – and uncharacteristic tact. Privately she was clear-sighted about the President’s limitations. ‘If I told you what Mrs Thatcher really thought about President Reagan it would damage Anglo-American relations,’ Nicholas Henderson told Tony Benn some years later.17 ‘Not much grey matter, is there?’ she once reflected.18 But she would never hear a word of criticism from others. In Reagan she put up with a bumbling ignorance she would have tolerated in no one else, partly because he was the President and leader of the free world, but also because she realised that his amiable vagueness gave her a chance to influence American policy that no conventionally hands-on President would have allowed her – as was quickly demonstrated when Reagan was succeeded by George Bush.
The basis of their partnership was laid back in 1975, when Mrs Thatcher was a newly elected Leader of the Opposition and the ex-Governor of California was just beginning to be talked of as a Presidential candidate. They had immediately found themselves on the same wavelength, and in due course each was delighted by the other’s election.Yet their relationship in office took a little time to develop. By no coincidence Mrs Thatcher was the first major foreign visitor to Washington after Reagan’s inauguration. She stated her position unambiguously at the welcoming ceremony on the White House lawn: ‘We in Britain stand with you…Your problems will be our problems, and when you look for friends we will be there.’ Reagan responded in kind. ‘In a dangerous world,’ he asserted, there was ‘one element that goes without question: Britain and America stand side by side.’19
But this was the conventional rhetoric of these occasions. At this stage the two leaders were still addressing each other formally on paper as ‘Dear Mr President… Dear Madame Prime Minister’.20 Their working partnership really began at the Ottawa G7 in July 1981. This was Reagan’s first appearance on the global stage, while she was now relatively experienced: he was grateful for her support, both personal and political. She chaperoned and prote
cted him, and made the case for American policy more effectively than he could, on the one hand for market solutions to the world recession against most of the other leaders who favoured more interventionist measures; and on the other in standing firm in support of the deployment of cruise missiles, from which the Europeans – faced with anti-nuclear demonstrations – were beginning to retreat. At the same time she warned Reagan privately that American criticism of European ‘neutralism’ risked provoking exactly the reaction it sought to prevent.21
Afterwards Reagan wrote to her for the first time as ‘Dear Margaret’, thanking her for her ‘important role in our discussions. We might still be drafting the communiqué if it were not for you.’ She in return addressed him for the first time as ‘Dear Ron’.22 Nine months later the Falklands crisis caused a temporary hiccup; but after some initial hesitation Reagan gave Britain the full support Mrs Thatcher felt entitled to expect. Arrangements had already been made for Reagan to visit London after the Versailles summit in June 1982. The trip had been planned at the nadir of Mrs Thatcher’s domestic unpopularity to lend support to an embattled ally; in the event it took place a few days before the Argentine surrender, at the climax of her military triumph. As well as meeting the Prime Minister in Downing Street, the President went riding with the Queen in Windsor Great Park and addressed members of both Houses of Parliament in the Royal Gallery, where he overcame a sceptical audience by praising Britain’s principled stand in the Falklands and borrowing freely from Churchill in asserting the moral superiority of the West. Freedom and democracy, he predicted, would ‘leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history’.[i] While the rest of his visit to Europe was disrupted by anti-nuclear demonstrations, the warmth of his reception in London moved the ‘special relationship’ visibly on to a new level.23
The Iron Lady Page 34
