On her way home she stopped off in Washington to see the President again. While she was with him Defense Secretary Dick Cheney called with the news that King Fahd had agreed to allow American forces to be stationed on Saudi soil: this was the key decision which made it possible to mount a military operation to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The same day the Security Council voted 13 – 0 to impose sanctions on Iraq. Mrs Thatcher immediately argued that this gave all the authority needed to impose a blockade to enforce them. But Bush shied away from the word ‘blockade’ which in international law constituted an act of war. He preferred the more diplomatic ‘quarantine’, which was the term President Kennedy had used to bar Soviet ships from Cuba in 1962.
The Gulf crisis came at an opportune moment for Mrs Thatcher, both internationally and domestically. So far as her relations with Bush were concerned, she was delighted to have the chance to demonstrate once again that Britain was still America’s best friend in a crisis, while scoffing at the Europeans’ feebleness. Whether or not her presence in Aspen significantly influenced Bush’s reaction, their identity of view instantly recreated the sort of Anglo-American special relationship she had enjoyed with Reagan.
A major international crisis also seemed just the thing to rebuild her position at home. The possibility of military action to repel another aggressive dictator could only revive memories of the Falklands. As in 1982 Mrs Thatcher relished the chance to show that she was not afraid of war. Woodrow Wyatt found her on 10 August ‘very bullish about the possibility of squashing Iraq’.59 Eight days later there occurred the incident that put a new phrase into the vocabulary of politics. The question was what to do about two Iraqi oil tankers which were trying to beat the allied blockade. ‘We had lengthy discussions with the British about it,’ Scowcroft recalled, ‘and of course Margaret Thatcher said go after the ships.’ But this risked upsetting the Soviets, who still retained some influence with Iraq, so James Baker persuaded Bush to hold off for three days. ‘Margaret went along with this delay only reluctantly’, Bush wrote:
I called her at about three in the morning her time – although I wasn’t looking forward to it… We knew how strongly she wanted to stop those ships. She insisted that if we let one go by it would set a precedent. I told her I had decided to delay and why. It was here, not earlier, as many have suggested, that she said, ‘Well, all right, George, but this is no time to go wobbly.’60
‘George always loved that’, Barbara Bush wrote, ‘and wobbly he did not go.’61 Thereafter, Scowcroft recalls, ‘we used the phrase almost daily’.62
Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher devoted her diplomatic efforts to berating anyone else she thought insufficiently robust – notably King Hussein who came to Downing Street in early September seeking support for a deal to save Saddam’s face. ‘He walked into a firestorm,’ Charles Powell recalled. ‘I was not discourteous,’ she insisted later. ‘I was firm – very firm indeed.’63 Above all she was contemptuous of those – most prominently Ted Heath – who muddied the waters by flying to Baghdad to try to negotiate the release of a number of British hostages whom Saddam was holding as pawns in a cruel game of diplomatic poker. In the Commons she was curtly dismissive of Heath’s freelance efforts: she was bound to welcome the return of thirty-three whom he had managed to bring out, but pointed out that there were still another 1,400 British nationals in the country.64 She resolutely refused to negotiate with such barbarism.
In fact her bellicosity, in a situation where British territory was not at stake, probably did her less good than she expected. The polls registered no significant recovery of her popularity over the next three months and the fact that British troops were committed did not save her when her leadership was on the line. Nevertheless, she enjoyed having a ‘real’ crisis on her hands again. But this time – remembering the trouble she had had with the Foreign Office in 1982 – she was determined to keep control firmly in her own hands. Once again she formed a small war cabinet – but it was not a properly constituted Cabinet committee, just an ad hoc ministerial group.
Her first military commitment, as early as 7 August, was to send two squadrons of Tornados and one of Jaguars to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, and a destroyer and three minesweepers to join the destroyer and two frigates already in the Gulf. She initially hoped to limit Britain’s ground contribution to an infantry or parachute battalion. But the Americans were pressing for tanks, so in September the Chief of the General Staff persuaded her to send the 7th Armoured Brigade (the ‘Desert Rats’) from Germany, plus two armoured regiments and an infantry regiment, led by Sir Peter de la Billière but ultimately under the command of US General Norman Schwarzkopf. (The French, by contrast, retained operational independence.)65 The army chiefs hoped that war in the Gulf would win them the same sort of reprieve that the Falklands had secured the Royal Navy.
Mrs Thatcher personally insisted on Peter de la Billière, who had impressed her as the SAS commander in charge of the Iranian Embassy siege back in 1980. He was what she called ‘a fighting general’ who even spoke passable Arabic. He was on the point of retirement, but she let it be known that if he was not appointed she would make him her adviser in Downing Street.66 The MoD gave way and sent him to the Gulf, where he fully justified her faith in him.
Almost as if she sensed that her own time might be short, she was impatient to act quickly, without waiting to see if sanctions might do the job without recourse to war and without seeking further authority from the UN. When Parliament was recalled on 6 September dissenting voices in all parties called for caution and delay. She argued on the contrary that ruling out early military action only played into Saddam’s hands. ‘I told them we already have the authority and don’t need to go back to the UN,’ she reported to Bush. She worried that trying but failing to get a UN resolution, due to a Russian or Chinese veto, would be worse than not trying at all, and saw no need to take the risk. Bush and Baker, however, judged it essential to secure another UN resolution; and by patient diplomacy they eventually succeeded. Resolution 678, authorising the use of force unless Iraq withdrew from Kuwait by 15 January 1991, was carried on 29 November by twelve votes to two (Cuba and Yemen voting against, China abstaining). But by that time Britain had a new Prime Minister.
Colin Powell, then chairman of the American Chiefs of Staff, wanted to give sanctions longer to work. General Schwarzkopf did not think he yet had enough troops. But Bush shared Mrs Thatcher’s fear that hanging about in the desert for months would put too much strain on the coalition. In Paris on 19 November she argued that Saddam’s use of hostages alone was reason enough to use force and promised ‘another brigade and some minesweepers’.67 She still worried that giving the military everything they wanted would mean further delay. But at her very last Cabinet three days later, after she had tearfully announced her resignation, she was better than her word and pushed through the commitment of another armoured brigade and an artillery brigade, all from the British Army of the Rhine, making a total British contribution of 45,000 personnel.
Her removal from office just as these preparations were gathering pace left her feeling cheated of another war. ‘One of my few abiding regrets,’ she maintained in her memoirs, ‘is that I was not there to see the issue through.’68 Her fall, according to Peter de la Billière, ‘caused consternation’ among the troops in the Gulf and dismayed the allies, particularly the Saudis, who could not understand how a democracy could replace a leader without an election.69 In fact ‘Desert Storm’ was so overwhelmingly an American operation that her absence made little difference.
As time passed, however, Lady Thatcher persuaded herself that she would not have acquiesced in the American decision to halt the pursuit of Saddam’s fleeing forces and leave the dictator still in power.Yet the truth is, as Field-Marshal Sir Michael Carver wrote in 1992, that ‘the decision to call a halt was a rare example of voluntarily ceasing hostilities at the right moment’.70 Having achieved the limited objective of getting Iraq out of Kuwait, the coalition had no authorit
y to go on to topple Saddam, while the Americans very wisely had no wish to get sucked into a long-term occupation of Iraq. ‘When she was in office,’ Percy Cradock recalled, ‘there was no serious talk of that kind, for good reasons.’71 In retirement Lady Thatcher forgot that when in office she was punctilious about respecting international law. From the start of the crisis she was always careful to limit the coalition’s objective to reversing the occupation of Kuwait: she repeatedly denied any intention of removing Saddam which, she said on 19 November, was ‘a matter for the people of Iraq’.72 Though she believed strongly in the proper application of military force, she was also passionately legalistic.
25
On and On
Ten more years?
ON 3 May 1989 Margaret Thatcher chalked up ten years as Prime Minister. Sixteen months earlier, on 3 January 1988, she had already become the longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Nevertheless she was reluctant to draw too much attention to the anniversary, partly from superstition, partly for fear that people would say ten years was enough.
Several of her senior colleagues, even as they applauded her achievement, felt she should have chosen this moment to announce that she would step down soon, when she could still have gone in triumph. Peter Carrington actually invited her to his house in Oxfordshire to urge her to retire ‘rather sooner than had been in my mind’.1 According to Carol, Denis had made up his mind as early as June 1987 that she should not fight another election as leader. He told her so around December 1988 and briefly thought he had convinced her. But at this stage Willie Whitelaw told her it would split the party. Denis knew she did not really want to give up and accepted defeat gracefully.2 But from now on he made no secret of his longing to name the day. He did not force the issue: it was her decision, but he had seen enough of politics to suspect that she would be hurt in the end if she stayed too long.
Having worked so hard all her life Mrs Thatcher dreaded retirement. She loved the job and felt no loss of ability to do it. She believed she had much more still to do. Moreover, she could not think of going until she was sure that she could hand over to a worthy successor who would protect her legacy and carry on her work with the same zeal that she had brought to it; and like most dominant leaders she saw no one who fitted the bill. She was determined to deny any candidate of her own political generation – that is Howe, Heseltine, Lawson or Tebbit – but did not believe that anyone in the next generation was yet ready. Her real problem was that none of the leading contenders from the next two political generations were true Thatcherites.
If she had wanted to groom a Thatcherite successor in the short term, the obvious candidate was Norman Tebbit. But Tebbit’s caustic style represented the unacceptable face of Thatcherism. ‘I couldn’t get him elected as leader of the Tory party even if I wanted to – nor would the country elect him if he was,’ she once told Rupert Murdoch.3 In any case – apart from the question of his injuries in the Brighton bomb – Tebbit had already fallen from favour before the 1987 election. The one presentable right-winger whom she had tried to bring on was John Moore, briefly puffed by the media as her chosen heir; but he had muffed his big chance at the Department of Health and disappeared from view in 1989.All this explains her identification, quite early on, of John Major.
Elected in 1979 with little ideological baggage, Major was not obviously either wet or dry but made his mark first as a whip, then as an able, industrious, self-effacing junior minister at Social Security until appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987. Quietly ambitious, he allowed the Prime Minister to think he was more of a Thatcherite than he really was: in fact, having known poverty as a boy and unemployment as a young man, he had a strong sympathy for the underdogs in society. In May 1989 Major was the only current minister invited to her anniversary lunch at Chequers. Woodrow Wyatt had not met him before but was impressed. ‘I am glad you like him,’ Mrs Thatcher told Wyatt later, ‘because I think he’s splendid.’4
Given that she had no intention of stepping down in the foreseeable future, it was difficult to strike the right note in public. As she had already learned in 1987, talk of going ‘on and on’ was counterproductive. She must not sound as if she intended to stay for ever. In her determination to give the media no opportunity to treat her as a lame duck, however, she sometimes spoke incautiously of going on to a fourth or even a fifth term.5
If the party conference loved the idea of ‘ten more years’, most of her parliamentary colleagues were much less enthusiastic. In politics, any long-serving leader represents a block on the prospects of others. After ten years a very high proportion of Tory MPs not in the Government had either had their chance or knew that it was never going to come; while those in office were uncomfortably aware that the only way she could freshen the Government, since she had no intention of retiring herself, was to keep shuffling the faces around her. One way and another, her support base at Westminster was growing dangerously thin.
Even as Mrs Thatcher insisted on her determination and fitness to carry on, therefore, there was a growing sense that her time was inexorably running out. She had come through dreadful by-elections and dire opinion polls before, in 1981 and again in 1986, and recorded landslide victories less than two years later. She saw no reason why she could not do it again. But this time round two things had changed. First, whereas in those previous pits of unpopularity her personal approval rating had always kept ahead of the Government’s, now her own figure fell commensurately. By the spring of 1990 it had settled at a lower level – around 25 per cent – than she had ever touched previously. At the same time Labour had begun to look – as John Biffen put it – ‘distinctly electable’.6 By late 1989 Labour was pushing towards 50 per cent in the polls and in February 1990 (for the first time since a brief moment in 1986) was the party thought most likely to win the next election.7
She was worried by the polls, but she half believed that everything would come right, as it always had before, as soon as the economy was back under control. She was most hurt by the personal polls. ‘They say I am arrogant,’ she complained to Wyatt. ‘I am the least arrogant person there is.’8 The trouble was, as an unnamed media adviser shrewdly put it in 1990, that she was the victim of her own success:
In 1979, 1983, 1987, they needed Mrs Thatcher to slay dragons… Now in 1990 many of the dragons are perceived to be slain, i.e. trade unions, communism, socialism, unemployment… The new dragons are perceived to be of the Government’s own making… The result of this is that people no longer know what they need Mrs Thatcher for.9
‘The Chancellor’s position was unassailable’
When Mrs Thatcher determined, after the Madrid summit, that she must break what she saw as the Lawson – Howe axis, she made the wrong choice by demoting Geoffrey Howe. Her real problem was with Nigel Lawson.There is a good case that she should have sacked Lawson the year before, when it became clear that they were pursuing irreconcilable financial policies. The trouble was that she admired and was slightly afraid of Lawson, despite her loss of trust in him, whereas she increasingly despised Howe; so Howe was the easy scapegoat, while she went on protesting her ‘full and unequivocal and generous backing’ for Lawson.10 But the fundamental difference between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister remained, and within three more months it came to a head.
The catalyst was the return of Alan Walters as Mrs Thatcher’s personal economic adviser. Lawson had warned her when she first mooted it that this was a bad idea. His difficulty was not simply that Walters reinforced her refusal to join the ERM. He had been living with that difference of opinion since 1986 and could have gone on living with it. His more serious problem was that Walters made no secret of his view that the Chancellor’s determination to hold the value of sterling above three Deutschmarks was misguided and unsustainable. Thus what Lawson calls the ‘countdown to resignation’ was triggered at the beginning of October by the Bundesbank’s decision to raise German interest rates, forcing Britain to follow suit with yet an
other increase at the worst possible political moment, just before the Tory Party Conference. Despite Walters’ warning that high interest rates were already threatening to drive Britain into recession, Mrs Thatcher reluctantly agreed to go to 15 per cent, provoking further howls of protest. But the next day, despite the interest-rate hike, sterling fell below DM3.
The Daily Mail, representing the hard-pressed mortgage payers of Middle England, ran a front-page splash denouncing ‘This Bankrupt Chancellor’, and Fleet Street seethed with rumours of his imminent resignation.11 Yet two days later Lawson still managed to win a standing ovation at Blackpool for a fighting speech defending high interest rates in the short term as the only way to beat inflation; and the next day Mrs Thatcher backed him with only an imperceptible difference of emphasis. Then she flew off for ten days to the Commonwealth Conference in Kuala Lumpur.
The Iron Lady Page 59
