Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (42 page)

Other forms of R&R were never on her agenda. She had no idea how to relax. She had no hobbies, no hinterland and no close friends with ‘an old shoe’ quality of comfortable familiarity. Recharging her batteries was a practice she had never heard of. She kept going at full throttle on a combination of extra adrenalin and extra work. But despite her protestations that she needed neither sleep nor holidays, there were times when her closest aides inside No. 10 thought she was physically and emotionally frazzled. Even when these signs of exhaustion coincided with the doldrums of August, the problem of persuading her that she needed a break was not easily solved – as the story of her first prime ministerial holiday in Scotland demonstrated.

DOG DAYS ON ISLAY

During her first August in office, she kept the wheels of power turning, partly by inventing tasks and summoning briefing papers. But in response to some gentle prodding from Ian Gow and others, she did finally agree to take a short holiday; the question was where?

The resourceful Gow telephoned Peter Morrison and enquired whether he could possibly put up a couple of extra guests ‘on that family island of yours in Scotland’.
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Morrison immediately agreed, thinking that he was offering a bed to Mr and Mrs Gow. He was surprised when the prospective guests were revealed to be the Prime Minister and Mr Denis Thatcher.

Professing an unexpected enthusiasm for Scottish scenery (‘I love the Highlands and Islands’
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), Margaret Thatcher set out for Islay House, Islay. This was an eighteenth-century mansion on a 73,000 acre estate owned by Peter Morrison’s father, Lord Margadale, looking out to sea across Loch Indaal on the most southerly tip of the Hebrides. Because the prime ministerial visit was at short notice, the twenty-four bedrooms of Islay House were already full with younger Morrisons and their friends, but the master bedroom was gladly vacated by Lord Margadale. The guest of honour enjoyed her first hours on the island with a short walk to the shores of the loch followed by a visit to a local distillery where samples of the local malt whisky were savoured by Denis.

It was the custom at Islay House for charades to be played after dinner. The Prime Minister sat uneasily through one round of these theatricals. She then retired to her bedroom, which was situated immediately above the wood-panelled ballroom where the games were taking place. The clan Morrison in full post-prandial cry were not a quiet family. With the decibels rising, they were surprised that their festivities were interrupted by some sharp knocks from the ceiling. For some reason no one associated these signals with the Prime Minister’s wish to have peace and quiet in her bedroom above.

The revels continued, moving from charades to a game called ‘Pull the Key’. This consisted of tying the large Victorian house key on a string, passing the string down every girl’s dress and up every man’s trousers as they stood in a line. Then at the
moment critique
, the key was pulled down the line accompanied by the inevitable cacophony of squeals, shouts and loud laughter.

The noise was more than Margaret Thatcher could bear. Unable to concentrate on her reading, she decided to take a nocturnal walk. So she donned her cloak and strode out into the gloaming. Thinking she had gone to bed, her Scotland Yard close protection detail had set off for a local pub. So the Prime Minister, believing she knew the geography of Islay from an earlier visit in her opposition days, strode out across the heather alone and unaccompanied.

There was, however, one police officer still on duty in the vicinity of Islay House. He was a dog handler from Strathclyde Police, tasked with keeping dangerous intruders away from the Prime Minister. This constable and his dog maintained their vigil on a hillock several hundred yards away. It was a lonely night shift until suddenly around 11.30 p.m. he spotted a hooded figure marching briskly across the moor. In the gloaming it was impossible to see anything
more than the outline shape and direction of the walker, who by this time was heading back towards Islay House.

The policeman shouted a challenge to the suspected intruder. There was no response. So he let his dog off the leash. Seconds later the Alsatian pounced on the hooded figure, who was knocked backwards and pinned to the ground. As the handler arrived on the scene he was horrified to discover that the suspect captured under his dog’s paws was none other than the British Prime Minister.

Alas, there is no record of the dialogue between the police officer and the Prime Minister. All that is known is that a dishevelled Margaret Thatcher, an apologetic constable and a tail-wagging Alsatian arrived back at Islay House together shortly before midnight.

Peter Morrison led the profuse apologies and tried to treat the incident with humour. But the lady was not for joking. ‘Her cloak was dirty, she was shaken up and pretty fed up’, he recalled later. ‘She went straight to bed. But the next day, in a chilly sort of way, she was good about it. She never wanted it mentioned again. So, of course, I hushed it up.’
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All was forgiven and forgotten. The incident passed into legend among her inner circle, with the punch-line question: ‘How on earth did the dog dare?’ This was a variation on an earlier jest by Lord Carrington who interrupted a colleague talking hypothetically about ‘If the Prime Minister was run over by a bus …’ with the interjection, ‘The bus would not dare’.
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REFLECTION

The analogy of the bus was to be tested in the coming months as various fast-moving political vehicles did their best to flatten Margaret Thatcher. Both on the economy and in foreign policy, she was about to travel through dangerous territory.

The reasons why she showed such strength in standing up to these pressures are to be found in the power of her personality. She was certain about her objectives. She had the character to stick to her guns. She surrounded herself with an inner core of staff and advisers who she felt were supporters and believers in her mission to restore Britain’s pride as a nation. And she psyched herself up with adrenalin to the point where she positively relished being opposed.

There was an interesting difference between the perception of Margaret Thatcher inside the government she was leading and the wider perception of her by the country. Those who had voted for her wanted her to succeed after the chaos of the ‘winter of discontent’. But for all the good-will towards her, the jury was out and the suspicion was widespread that she might not be capable of dealing with the unions and the economic problems. Inside the Tory Party, the hesitations about her were palpable. Ted Heath remained a brooding presence poised to ferment trouble. He was by no means the only brooder.

John Hoskyns, less than a month after his appointment as Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, met a senior City friend at a Rifle Brigade regimental dinner, who asked him: ‘Is it true you’re now working for Mrs Thatcher? … You must be the most frightful shit.’
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Hoskyns noted in his diary that the remark ‘captured perfectly the ambivalent attitude of my friends towards the new government and its leader’.
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The ambivalence was however lessening at the heart of government in Whitehall. For every Sir Humphrey who was being obstructive in the face of the new broom, there were several younger deputy secretaries or assistant secretaries who were being singled out by her as ‘good doers’.
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They encountered her up close in the abrasive decision-making meetings that she used to hammer out policies. They saw, as the world came to see, that their new boss had extraordinary qualities of energy, courage and determination to change Britain. ‘There’s a feeling round here of “
Enfin, nous avons un maître
” ’,
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said a rising young star of the Foreign Office, David Gore-Booth, echoing the words of French bureaucrats soon after the arrival of Napoleon in Paris in 1792.

However hard Margaret Thatcher was trying to become master in her own house, her climb up the learning curve of government was proving more difficult than she expected, in two areas.

One was the economy, which was responding far too slowly to the medicine she had prescribed for it. The other was foreign policy, where her inexperience brought her into much creative tension with her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington.

17

First steps in foreign affairs

LEARNING FROM LORD CARRINGTON

Margaret Thatcher and Lord Carrington had an occasionally stormy but generally successful relationship as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Because they both had strong wills and short fuses, they had many fierce arguments. One of the most heated of their rows blew up in Washington, DC, a few minutes before the start of a summit with the recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan in February 1981.

The Prime Minister was in a state of tense excitement about her meeting with the new leader of the free world. She had encountered Reagan twice on his visits to London, when she was in opposition and he was in the wilderness as an ex-Governor of California. She had taken a shine to his good looks, his courtly gallantry and his conservative credentials. Now he was in the White House she hoped that they might be able to energise the UK–US ‘special relationship’, making it far more productive than it had been in the first twenty months of her premiership, working in harness with Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter.

With these aspirations in mind, Margaret Thatcher brought a strong team to Washington on her RAF VC10. Along with her Foreign Secretary, she was accompanied by Sir Robert Armstrong (Secretary to the Cabinet), Sir Michael Palliser (Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir Frank Cooper (Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence). All of them had submitted briefing papers, which she studied and annotated with her habitual diligence.

The Prime Minister rose early at Blair House
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on the morning of Thursday 26 February to put in some extra preparation for her 10 a.m.
tête à tête
with
President Reagan. As it was not known which subjects he might raise in their discussion, she carefully reviewed the briefing papers prepared for her by the Foreign Office. One on the Middle East aroused her disapproval. She made a number of harsh comments about it over breakfast to Sir Michael Palliser, whose laconic replies did not calm her indignation. So she asked Carrington to join them. Before he could sit down, she said accusingly: ‘Your policy on Palestine is going to lose us the next election.’

‘I rather thought it was the government’s policy on Palestine’, answered the Foreign Secretary.

His urbanity increased her irascibility. She let fly with a string of offensive remarks about ‘the moral cowardice’ of the Foreign Office, and then returned to the impact of its Palestinian proposals on domestic politics.

‘What’s more, not only is your Palestine policy going to lose us the next election,’ she hectored Carrington, ‘it is going to lose me my seat in Finchley … I will definitely lose my seat in Finchley because of this stuff’, she shouted, slamming the briefing paper down on the table.

Now it was Carrington’s turn to get angry. ‘If you think that British foreign policy should be based on whether you will lose your seat in Finchley, you need a new Foreign Secretary’, he retorted, storming out of the room and slamming the door.
¹

After this upheaval there was, to put it mildly, a chill between the two senior members of the British delegation as they headed off to the White House for their summit with the President of the United States. It was non-speaks in the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce on the short journey across Pennsylvania Avenue. But the civilities were restored after the
tête a tête
and the welcoming ceremonies. The Prime Minister murmured to her Foreign Secretary: ‘I don’t think we did very well this morning, did we?’ It was, by her standards, an apology.

What may have been behind the Prime Minister’s aggression at Blair House was an anxiety that the strongly pro-Israeli Ronald Reagan was going to ask her awkward questions about the British proposals for progress on the Israel– Palestine issue. But the broad-brush President was not interested in getting down to such detail. He simply wanted to throw a warm mantle of welcome around his fellow-conservative head of government. So the summit, which dealt with few issues of substance, apart from the President’s determination to resist
the spread of communism in Latin America, passed off as a great success. Nevertheless, the early morning row had highlighted Margaret Thatcher’s fear that Carrington, as she put it, ‘was intent on pursuing lines which I knew would in practice be quite fruitless, given the President’s unshakable commitment to a limited number of positions’.
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In fact, Carrington had no such intention, so the eruption had been needless and pointless.

Lord Carrington was too grand and secure a figure to become unduly bothered by an up and downer with his boss. As at Blair House, he could at times be baffled by her rudeness and wrong-headedness. But he also saw her strength of will and determination. He said:

I admired her enormously, particularly her courage and her character. I understood that in her passion to change things, she decided to ignore people, sometimes trample over people, who told her she couldn’t or shouldn’t take such a course. But the problem was that if you do that when you’re wrong, you can get into serious trouble.
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There was quite a lot of trampling in the early days of the Carrington–Thatcher foreign-policy partnership. She was hostile to the Foreign Office as an institution and to some of its leading mandarins. She behaved unfairly to its Permanent Secretary, Sir Michael Palliser, mainly because his elaborately polite style jarred with her preference for a rough and tumble argument. This was all too often based, at least in her first two or three years as Prime Minister, on ill-informed prejudices. Carrington explained:

You had to be pretty quick with her because her instincts on foreign policy were often wrong, but her brain was very good. So you had to get to her before those instincts had pre-empted the brain. If you didn’t reach her early enough, it took quite a struggle before her heart would rather grudgingly yield to her highly intelligent head. By golly it was hard work sometimes!
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One area of hard work was policy towards the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher felt the Foreign Office was soft towards the Kremlin. ‘You don’t have anyone in your department who knows anything about the Russians’, she told Carrington contemptuously.

‘You’re absolutely wrong. I have two outstanding experts. Come and meet them’, he replied. The following evening at 6 p.m. Margaret Thatcher came round
to the Foreign Office to have a drink with its top Sovietologists, Christopher Mallaby and Rodric Braithwaite.

Carrington had warned his mandarins about her propensity to interrupt and, sure enough, within seconds of Mallaby’s opening presentation he found himself being contradicted by the Prime Minister. He pressed on regardless with the magisterial rebuff: ‘If I may just be allowed to continue …’ By the time he and Braithwaite had finished, she was captivated. ‘She was so impressed that from then on she sidelined her gurus’, claimed Carrington.
⁵
This was not entirely correct, for she continued to listen to her private anti-Soviet voices such as Robert Conquest. But at least she gave more weight to the departmental advice for a while.

Two weeks after this meeting, the Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary made a refuelling stop in Moscow on their way to the G7 summit held in Tokyo. To their surprise, half the Politburo of the Soviet Union, headed by Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin, turned out to meet her. They gave an unscheduled dinner in her honour in an aircraft hanger. After listening to a speech of diplomatic bromides from the Soviet leader, Margaret Thatcher responded with a sharp and detailed reply. Looking magnificent in her cobalt blue suit and matching hat, she fired off a salvo of questions, vigorously interrupting the answers.

One of her major concerns was the plight of the Vietnamese boat people, which was causing problems to the British colony of Hong Kong. The Prime Minister said that what was happening was a disgrace not only to the regime in Vietnam, but to communism as a whole. Surely the Soviet Union could exercise its influence to put a stop to it? Premier ‘Cosy Gin’, as Carrington nicknamed Kosygin, gave a watery smile and the excuse that the boat people ‘were all drug-takers or criminals’. Margaret Thatcher interrupted him: ‘What, one million of them? Is communism so bad that a million have to take drugs to steal to live?’
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The subject was immediately dropped. According to Carrington, ‘The Politburo’s eyes were out on stalks as she told them off on issue after issue. They were mesmerised. They were astonished at being beaten over the head, but they saw her strength and quality.’
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The Prime Minister was also awarded a star-quality rating in Tokyo, where over a thousand journalists turned out at the airport to report on the phenomenon of a woman leader. But she was underwhelmed by her first experience of global
summitry. Prior to departure for Tokyo, her major preoccupation had been to ensure that the British delegation was the smallest of the participating G7 countries. She made her Private Secretary for Overseas Affairs, Bryan Cartledge, count and recount the size of the other delegations in the hope that they would all be larger. ‘In the end, we were only the second smallest’, he recalled. ‘We were beaten by the Canadians. She was very cross about that.’
⁸

Her frugality about the size of her official party might have seemed an odd preoccupation had it not been for the pointlessness of the summit. Carrington said:

It was useless, a complete waste of time – nothing agreed, nothing achieved. She was bemused by the stupidity of it all. We both found it impossible to tell whether the Japanese Prime Minister chairing the conference, Masayoshi Ohira, was asleep or awake. The only point to it all was that she did meet President Carter for the first time. She was a bit bemused by him.
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Carrington was her tutor on her geopolitical learning curve. Sometimes he handled her as a father figure, sometimes as her leading man, sometimes as her in-house humorist. One occasion when he made her laugh came during a Downing Street meeting with Chairman Hua Guofeng, the immediate successor to Chairman Mao. The Chinese leader opened the discussion with a fifty-minute monologue, not allowing the Prime Minister to get a word in edgeways. Carrington passed her a note saying: ‘You are speaking too much, as usual.’ She opened this missive just as Chairman Hua was saying, ‘Now I come to the tragedy of the Holocaust …’ He must have been baffled by the Prime Minister pulling out her handkerchief to suppress a fit of giggles. Those inscrutable British!
¹⁰

Usually, however, it was Margaret Thatcher who seized the lion’s share of the dialogue during such meetings. On at least a couple of occasions Carrington had to pass her a note saying, ‘He’s come 1,000 miles. Let him say something.’ She took such teasing well; partly because, up to a point, she was amused by the irreverence of an authentic toff, and partly because she respected his foreign-policy expertise. As a former UK High Commissioner in Australia, First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for Defence, an international banker and a director of Rio Tinto Zinc, he had come to know the world and almost everyone
of importance in it. To bring the new Prime Minister up to the same level of understanding was his greatest challenge. Carrington recalled:

Frankly, there were times when I found her intensely irritating. Her prejudices were sometimes extraordinary. She seemed to believe all blacks were communists. When we were on our first trip to Africa together, she put on a pair of dark glasses just before our VC10 touched down at Lusaka. ‘What on earth are those for?’ I asked, since we were landing in darkness. ‘I am absolutely certain that they are going to throw acid in my face’, she replied. ‘I told her not to be so silly, and that an African crowd would be much more likely to cheer her. That is exactly what happened.’
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The Thatcher–Carrington preparations for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Lusaka were particularly fraught. The most important issue on the agenda was Rhodesia. She had strong views on its future, a problem which had proved intractable to successive British governments ever since the regime of Ian Smith had made its Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965. Thirteen years later Ian Smith reached a power-sharing agreement with the leaders of the two more moderate African parties. This was ratified in the April 1979 election, with Bishop Muzorewa becoming Prime Minister, but was boycotted by the two major African nationalist parties, and condemned by most international opinion. But Margaret Thatcher’s personal emissary to Rhodesia, the former Colonial Secretary Viscount Boyd of Merton, reported that the elections had been fair and valid.

After reading Boyd’s report, Margaret Thatcher’s instincts were to recognise the Smith–Muzorewa settlement. Carrington persuaded her otherwise. It was a U-turn that required all his formidable skills of argument. He recalled:

We had several flaming rows. In the end she listened to the evidence, which was that every single Commonwealth country as well as the United States and Europe would not wear the solution she wanted. But she still did not give way completely, until we were on the flight to Lusaka. While we were having dinner in mid-air, I said to her that I thought the best result we would get from the conference would be to pull off a damage-limitation exercise. She claimed she’d never heard of such a phrase – ‘typical Foreign Office language’, she called it – and then she said, ‘I want to do better than that’.
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It was the first clear sign that the Carrington tutorials on Africa might be beginning to work.

RHODESIA

Solving the problem of Rhodesia was Margaret Thatcher’s first major success as Prime Minister at home or abroad. After her initial obduracy she turned out to be a surprisingly pragmatic operator in the unfamiliar waters of African diplomacy. She showed courage, charm and considerable flexibility in achieving the desired result.