The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Once again, however, Mrs Thatcher had to swallow her objections and accept ‘a compromise text close to the original draft’. Flexible response was modified and the Alliance declared that it was ‘moving away’ from forward defence. At her insistence the words ‘weapons of last resort’ were stiffened with an assertion that there were ‘no circumstances in which nuclear retaliation in response to military action might be discounted’. Mrs Thatcher was still not happy with ‘this unwieldy compromise’.32 But she had no veto in NATO as she had in Europe, so she had to accept it. ‘It was a landmark shift,’ Bush wrote. ‘It offered the Soviets firm evidence of the West’s genuine desire to change NATO. Our offer was on the table.’33

  The final act of the Cold War was also, suitably enough, the final act of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. In November 1990, as the votes were being cast in London which forced her resignation, she was in Paris attending a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), at which she committed Britain to substantial cuts in the stationing of conventional forces in Germany. In reality it was a largely ceremonial occasion, with congratulatory speeches celebrating the victory of freedom over tyranny and resolution over coexistence. But it was the triumph of everything Mrs Thatcher had been fighting for all her political life.

  The environment and global warming

  A major new issue appeared on the political agenda in the late 1980s – and Margaret Thatcher, with all her other domestic and international concerns, deserves much of the credit for putting it there. Since the 1970s ‘the environment’ had been the fashionable term for a ragbag of relatively minor problems to do with planning and land use. Around 1988, however, environmental concerns suddenly acquired a new dimension with the discovery of global warming, caused – probably – by the build-up in the earth’s atmosphere of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’: carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. From parochial questions of road building and waste disposal which were normally beneath a Prime Minister’s notice, the environment assumed, almost overnight, the status of an international challenge which transcended even the Cold War.

  In the early years of her premiership Mrs Thatcher had not taken environmental concerns very seriously. As a combative Tory politician she saw environmental campaigners, particularly Greenpeace, as just another branch of CND, a mix of sincere but naive sentimentalists. She insisted that socialism, inherently inefficient and unaccountable, was the great polluter, whereas free enterprise was both more efficient and better able to spend resources on environmental protection. Indeed, she suggested in 1988, cleaning up pollution was ‘almost a function of prosperity, because it is the East European block, their chemical factories, that have been pouring stuff into the Rhine’.34

  She also believed that coal and other fossil fuels beloved of the left were intrinsically dirty, whereas nuclear energy was clean and safe. Those who campaigned against nuclear power on environmental grounds were simply wrong, like those who imagined they were promoting peace by opposing nuclear weapons. She saw it as her business to cut through this sort of emotive nonsense to deal with the facts. Proud of her credentials as a scientist in a world of arts-educated generalists, she believed that she understood the scientific arguments. She believed that scientific problems would be solved by the further development of science, not by regulation.

  One project she had always backed, even before the Falklands gave her a special interest in the region – was the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). It therefore gave her great patriotic satisfaction that it was the scientists of the BAS who in 1985 discovered a large hole in the earth’s ozone layer, nearly as large as the United States and growing. International efforts had already been under way for some time to limit the emission of halogen gases, principally chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays: a UN-sponsored conference in Montreal in 1987 set a target of halving the use of CFCs in ten years. But the fact that the hole in the ozone layer was a British discovery undoubtedly helped persuade Mrs Thatcher to throw her weight into efforts to remedy it. She was also greatly influenced by Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1987 to 1990, Sir Crispin Tickell, a career diplomat who happened to be a serious amateur meteorologist. It was Tickell who brought the urgency of the problem to Mrs Thatcher’s attention and persuaded her to make it the subject of a major speech, which he then helped her to write.

  A decade later her speech to the Royal Society in September 1988 was remembered as ‘a true epiphany, the blinding discovery of a conviction politician, which overnight turned the environment from being a minority to a mainstream concern in Britain’.35 At the time it made rather less impact. Most of it was a standard affirmation of the Government’s commitment to science; only towards the end did she turn to the three recently observed phenomena of greenhouse gases, the hole in the ozone layer, and acid rain. She stressed the need for more research, as well as immediate steps to cut emissions, and emphasised how much money the Government was already spending on cleaning Britain’s rivers.36

  In March 1989 Mrs Thatcher chaired a three-day conference in London on Saving the Ozone Layer, attended by 123 nations, which strengthened the Montreal protocol by setting a new target of ending CFC emissions entirely by the end of the century: she spoke at both the beginning and the end. Within Whitehall and the EC she chased progress vigorously on the tightening of anti-pollution regulations, backing the DoE against the Treasury and other departments which raised the sort of objections on grounds of cost that she herself used to make a few years earlier.37 In August she told President Bush of ‘her intention to overhaul Britain’s environmental legislation’ – clearly trying to encourage him to do the same;38 and in November she made a major speech to the UN General Assembly in which she announced the establishment of a new climate research centre in Britain and called for ‘a vast international co-operative effort’ to save the global environment.39

  All this was before the final report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in June 1990. This – the unanimous conclusion of 300 international scientists – warned that if no action were taken to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, average global temperatures would rise by anything between 1.4 and 2.8 per cent by 2030, causing sea levels to rise with disastrous consequences for low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Holland and East Anglia. (Mrs Thatcher was particularly fond of pointing out that one Commonwealth country, the Maldive Islands, with a population of 177,000, would disappear entirely.)40 This was the first authoritative international confirmation that global warming was really happening, though the evidence was already visible in severe drought leading to famine in Sudan, Ethiopia and much of central Africa. But Mrs Thatcher, encouraged by Crispin Tickell, had already anticipated its recommendations. Opening the promised new research centre – the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – near Bracknell in Berkshire in May 1990, she committed Britain to stabilising carbon dioxide emissions by 2005, which actually meant a 30 per cent cut over fifteen years, back to the 1990 figure. ‘This,’ she told George Bush pointedly, ‘is a demanding target.’41

  But the Americans dragged their feet. At the London conference the previous year they had combined with the Soviet Union and Japan to reject an earlier target date for the elimination of CFCs. Now Bush told a conference in Washington that more research was needed before action on carbon dioxide would be justified. Mrs Thatcher pressed him to take the matter seriously.

  Her words fell on deaf ears.At the second World Climate Conference in Geneva in November, 137 countries agreed that global warming was a reality and pledged themselves to take action. But while the EC, Japan and Australia advocated freezing CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000, the Americans, this time supported by the USSR and Saudi Arabia, opposed the setting of firm targets. In her speech at the conference – one of her last appearances on the world stage before her fall – Mrs Thatcher tactfully made no direct criticism of American or Russian reluctance. But for once she
had to admit that Europe was showing the way. ‘I hope that Europe’s example will help the task of securing worldwide agreement.’42

  In Tickell’s view the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, at which 170 countries including the Americans finally agreed to cut CO2 emissions by 2000, would never have happened without her effort. Five years later the 1997 Kyoto Agreement set a new target of cutting emissions back to the 1990 level by 2010 – only for the US, now led by Bush’s resolutely isolationist and oil-oriented son, to refuse to ratify it.

  But by then Lady Thatcher had changed her mind. As part of her increasingly slavish subservience to American leadership in the late 1990s, she concluded in her last book, Statecraft, that ‘President Bush was quite right to reject the Kyoto protocol’. Half-baked scaremongering about climate change, she now believed, had been seized on by the left to furnish ‘a marvellous excuse for worldwide supra-national socialism’. The environmental movement was just the latest manifestation of fashionable anti-capitalism, containing ‘an ugly streak of anti-Americanism’.43 This U-turn, made for frankly political reasons, marks a sad retreat from her brave pioneering in the late 1980s, when she had in her own way been a good friend of the earth.

  Arms and the Gulf

  Meanwhile, in her last months in office, the scandal of the covert arming of Iraq began to break. When the Iran – Iraq war finally ended in stalemate in July 1988, Alan Clark (then still in the DTI) and the latest Minister for Defence Procurement in the MoD, Lord Trefgarne, immediately began lobbying the Foreign Office to lift the 1985 guidelines restricting arms sales to both combatants. Geoffrey Howe was sympathetic and in August minuted Mrs Thatcher, spelling out the commercial benefits of ‘a phased approach to borderline cases’. Charles Powell replied that she was ‘in general content with the strategy’, but it would need careful watching: ‘The PM will wish to be kept very closely in touch at every stage and consulted on all relevant decisions.’44 One of the questions that Lord Justice Scott’s subsequent inquiry had to answer was whether this instruction was obeyed. Having studied the exchanges between Clark, Trefgarne and the new Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave, Scott concluded that after December 1988 the relevant correspondence was not copied to the Prime Minister; she was therefore unaware of the subtle semantic revision which allowed the three ministers henceforth to interpret the guidelines more generously.45 In truth, however, whether or not she knew of the new wording, she cannot have failed to notice that exports to Iraq increased rapidly as soon as the war ended. In October she specifically approved new export credits worth £340 million.46

  The following month Saddam Hussein turned his violence against his own population and started murdering and gassing the Iraqi Kurds.Yet the flow of British machine tools to his munitions factories continued unabated. The only effect on British policy was to make those in the know more anxious to keep it secret: ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, continued to hide behind Howe’s 1985 guidelines, insisting to Parliament that nothing had changed. On the ground the British sales effort could scarcely have been more blatant. In April 1989 no fewer than seventeen major British companies attended the Baghdad arms fair. At last some alarm bells began to ring in Downing Street. In May Mrs Thatcher was sufficiently disturbed by the intelligence she was receiving to set up a Cabinet Office working group on Iraqi procurement (WGIP). But what was it that had disturbed her? According to Scott – based on the evidence she gave to his inquiry in December 1993 – she ‘had become concerned about the extent of the Iraqi network for the procurement of materials and equipment for proliferation purposes, as well as of conventional defence-related goods and equipment, from the UK’.47 In other words she only became concerned when she thought the Iraqis were obtaining nuclear materials, not just conventional equipment, which she had been happy to supply for years.[p]

  Within the Ministry of Defence at least one officer was becoming alarmed at ‘the scale on which the Iraqis are building up an arms manufacturing capability’. In June Lt-Col. Richard Glazebrook circulated a paper drawing attention to ‘the way in which UK Ltd is helping Iraq often unwittingly to set up a major indigenous arms industry’.49 He managed to block the export of an infra-red surveillance system but still the build-up went on: he failed to stop a consignment of helicopter spares and a Marconi communications system which would enhance the Iraqi forces’ effectiveness in the field. In July his Secretary of State, George Younger, put up to the Cabinet’s OD committee a proposal to grant export licences for a £3 billion sale by BAe of ‘the “know-how”, equipment and components necessary to enable Iraq to assemble 63 Hawk aircraft’. This, according to Scott, was the first admission to senior ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, that the interpretation of the 1985 guidelines had been changed.50 In their evidence Clark, Trefgarne and Waldegrave argued that the order fell within the revised guidelines, since the Hawk, though capable of being adapted for chemical weapons, was not strictly designed to be lethal. Sharp as ever, Mrs Thatcher wrote in the margin ‘Doubtful’; but she failed to pick up the crucial word ‘revised’.51

  A note by the deputy Cabinet Secretary, Leonard Appleyard, set out the humanitarian case against this latest sale and warned of a hostile press if it was approved. Mrs Thatcher underlined several passages, indicating that she shared these concerns. Charles Powell had initially favoured the sale, since ‘the pot of gold is enticingly large’; and Percy Cradock agreed. But after reading Appleyard’s note Powell changed his mind. ‘Iraq is run by a despicable and violent government which has gloried in the use of CW [chemical weapons] and a substantial defence sale to them would be seen as highly cynical and opportunistic.’ Mrs Thatcher told the Scott Inquiry that she agreed – on moral grounds:

  ‘Even though this is a big order,’ she said, ‘you cannot let [that] influence your judgement against your deep instinct and knowledge that it would be wrong to sell this kind of aircraft, that could be used for ground attack, to a regime that had in fact used chemical weapons on the Kurds.’52

  On this occasion the committee refused an export licence. Yet even now – despite her fine words – the Prime Minister was no more willing than her junior colleagues to stop supplying Iraq with the ability to build sophisticated weapons. Right up to the end of July she was seeking to ease rather than tighten restrictions. A meeting chaired by Douglas Hurd on 26 July confirmed the embargo on ‘lethal’ material but recommended relaxing controls on the export of lathes for the manufacture of weapons – and Powell minuted that ‘the Prime Minister found the Foreign Secretary’s presentation convincing’.53 In the event the new policy was never implemented: it was wrecked by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait a few days later and hastily buried. But by approving it Mrs Thatcher retrospectively endorsed the earlier shift of practice on which the whole Scott Inquiry centred. The fact is that right up to the last moment she had been eager to arm Britain’s new enemy.

  ‘No time to go wobbly’

  Mrs Thatcher had just arrived in the United States on Thursday 2 August 1990 to attend the fortieth anniversary conference of the Aspen Institute in Colorado when the news came in that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. She immediately took a clear view that the Iraqi action – like Argentina’s in 1982 – must be reversed, by force if necessary. Little as she liked telephone diplomacy, she lost no time in making a series of calls: to European heads of government, starting with François Mitterrand, whose prompt support over the Falklands she had never forgotten; to Commonwealth leaders; friendly Arab leaders; and the current members of the Security Council. Most promised support for some form of collective action. The exception, to her disappointment, was King Hussein of Jordan who – as she later told President Bush – was ‘not helpful. He told me the Kuwaitis had it coming.’54

  Bush had, of course, been making many of the same calls himself, so by the time he joined Mrs Thatcher in Aspen the next morning they had already assembled the nucleus of an international coalition against Iraq. They talked for two hours, discussing economic sanctions but not a
t this stage military options, then went outside to speak to the press. ‘Prime Minister Thatcher and I are looking at it on exactly the same wavelength,’ Bush told them. But Mrs Thatcher sounded much the more forceful of the two. While Bush hoped for a peaceful settlement and called for the Iraqis to withdraw in accordance with UN Resolution 660 (carried 14 – 0 by the Security Council overnight), it was she – as he later recognised – who ‘put her finger on the most important point by insisting that Iraq’s aggression was a test of the international community’s willingness to give the Resolution teeth’: ‘What has happened,’ she added, ‘is a total violation of international law. You cannot have a situation where one country marches in and takes over another country which is a member of the United Nations.’55

  But, of course, it was not quite as altruistic as that.Though neither leader acknowledged it, their real concern was that – having annexed the Kuwaiti oilfields – Saddam might, if not prevented, go on to seize the even more important Saudi reserves. ‘They won’t stop here,’ Mrs Thatcher told Bush. ‘Losing Saudi oil is a blow we couldn’t take. We cannot give in to dictators.’56

  It is still disputed whether or not Mrs Thatcher’s presence in Aspen at the critical moment helped determine Bush’s response to the Iraqi invasion. The Americans insist that the President needed no stiffening; and Bernard Ingham (who was there) agrees. ‘George Bush had a backbone before he arrived in Aspen and did not acquire it from Mrs Thatcher… Her familiar distinctive contribution [was] a clear and simply expressed analysis of the situation.’57 Doubt arose from the fact that in his first public response the President had stated that he was ‘not contemplating’ military action. This choice of words, Scowcroft admitted, was ‘not felicitous’, but he insists that it was not meant to rule out the use of force, merely to keep all options open.58 Nevertheless the belief took hold in Britain that Bush was a bit of a wimp who was impelled to strong action only by Mrs Thatcher’s robust example – an impression which she was happy to perpetuate. Actually it was not until some weeks later that she told Bush that this was ‘no time to go wobbly’. There was certainly a difference of emphasis between them: Bush was more concerned than Mrs Thatcher to assemble the widest possible coalition of Western and Muslim nations, and to take no military action without the specific authority of the United Nations, while she wanted to invoke Article 51 of the Charter to justify action in self-defence without further ado. But there is no doubt of Bush’s personal resolve.