Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (43 page)

She was frightened and worried when she arrived in Lusaka. Although her fears of having acid thrown in her face proved groundless, as Carrington had assured her, it still took courage to walk into the crowds (without her dark glasses) and to have to face a hostile media conference. In the airport chaos she became separated from her staff, including her Press Secretary, Henry James. She was unwell because of a stomach bug, and nearly fainted. Yet she gave as good as she got from the hostile Zambian journalists, who treated her as a colonial cardboard cut-out, and described her as ‘a racist’.
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But the British press corps thought she showed grace and spirit under the pressure of her interrogation. John Simpson of the BBC reported that she had given ‘a magnificent performance’.
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The atmosphere at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was more friendly. Margaret Thatcher’s mistrust of Africa softened under the warmth of the welcome she received. This had a lot to do with the Queen’s skill at presiding over the social side of the conference. Also, the presidents of the ‘front-line’ states, namely Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia, were politically more accommodating in private than they sounded in their public statements. Many of the other twenty-seven heads of government attending were also helpful in nudging the main protagonists towards an agreement.

The most positive leader was the host of the conference, President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. He went out of his way to cajole his fellow Africans into accepting the British proposals they did not initially like. He also charmed Margaret Thatcher (or did she charm him?) in a session of dance-floor diplomacy. The photographs of the quickstep between the Zambian President and the British Prime Minister came to symbolise their good rapport. According to Denis Thatcher, their whirl round the ballroom ‘turned the trick’ at the conference.
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In reality, the trick was turned by the surprise reversal of what was widely assumed to be Margaret Thatcher’s position on Rhodesia. She accepted a bold
plan, the brainchild of an imaginative FCO official, Robin Renwick, that Britain should abandon its impotent role as the colonial power and assume a powerful new role as the decolonising power. To the astonishment of the assembled heads of government, the Prime Minister announced that the Smith–Muzorewa settlement would be abandoned. Britain would take the driving seat in delivering black majority rule, not the United Nations. Rhodesia would first resort to its pre-UDI colonial status with a British governor who would supervise direct elections policed by British troops. The future constitutional arrangements would be decided by a British-chaired conference at Lancaster House in London with the key African politicians, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo at the table. It was a U-turn but it was a U-turn on her terms. Some of the Africans were unenthusiastic but once Kaunda backed the plan, declaring that ‘the Iron Lady has brought a ray of hope on the dark horizon’, they all fell into line.
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Margaret Thatcher had misgivings about the plan she endorsed. The way she read out her part of the communiqué at the end of the conference was in a head-down, high-speed monotone, far removed from her usual vocal range when handing down the commandments of conviction politics. But in the excitement of getting the deal, she finally became committed to it. Having arrived in Lusaka fearful, she left hopeful. As Carrington put it: ‘She didn’t really believe that we would ever agree a final settlement, but once she saw there was a real hope of getting an agreement she went for it.’
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When the long-running Rhodesia saga moved to London in September, the Prime Minister left the details of the Lancaster House constitutional conference to her Foreign Secretary. It took sixteen weeks of arduous negotiations between the parties. It was not her show, but she did play two key cards in it with clarity and courage.

First, she remained determinedly aloof from the negotiating process. The white Rhodesians, egged on by the Rhodesia Lobby in London, had always expected that she would act as a final court of appeal through which her ‘kith and kin’ might be able to extract some last-minute concessions. She would have none of it. She was firm in the commitment she had made in Lusaka to black majority rule.

Second, she took a considerable risk, when the civil war was still raging in Rhodesia, in sending Lord Soames out to Salisbury as Governor. He and the small contingent of British troops protecting him could easily have been engulfed
in the violence. But the gamble was taken and it worked. Soames was able to supervise free, fair and peaceful elections in February 1980. They produced a decisive result. Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister, and power was formally transferred from Britain to an independent Zimbabwe on 17 April 1980.

Watching the independence ceremony on television with her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow, Margaret Thatcher wept as the Union Jack was lowered. ‘The poor Queen’, she said. ‘Do you realise the number of colonies that have been handed over from the British Empire since she came to the throne?’
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For the next fifteen or so years, there seemed few reasons for shedding tears over Zimbabwe. Although it quickly became a one-party state, the worst fears of the pessimists were not realised. The civil war ended, black- and white-owned farms flourished, the population was well fed, infant mortality halved, secondary school places quadrupled. Although Mugabe made many speeches about his Marxist credo, not an acre of land was confiscated and not a single business was compulsorily nationalised. As a mixed economy it was relatively successful. Only at the end of the century did Mugabe emerge as a tyrannical dictator who launched violence against white farmers, seizing their land and handing it over to his cronies. He also brutalised his people with cruel oppression and starvation.

So what looked like a diplomatic triumph in 1980 had turned to ashes by the early twenty-first century. Margaret Thatcher cannot be blamed for this tragedy, which unfolded long after she left power. In the period when Zimbabwean independence took root, she won high praise for her statescraft. In her heart of hearts, she might well have preferred to maintain British colonial rule or a power-sharing regime along Smith–Muzorewa lines. But these were not options. Given the politics of Africa at the time of the Lusaka conference in 1979, she found the best solution. Sadly, it lasted for only one generation.

EUROPE

‘I came to realise that Margaret Thatcher didn’t really like people whose mother tongue was not English’, said Lord Carrington. ‘She mistrusted Europeans, and her dealings with them were often very embarrassing because she was so rude to everyone.’
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Although mistrust and bad manners were often at the forefront of Margaret Thatcher’s many arguments with her fellow heads of government
in Europe, it should be recorded that the opening blows of rudeness were struck against her, not by her. The perpetrators were the leaders of France and Germany.

Her first foreign visitor to Downing Street in May 1979 was the German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. She initially found him an attractive personality, and was dismayed when he patronised her with a condescending attitude. However, in the
folie de grandeur
stakes, he was soon overtaken by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France. As the host of the European Council summit in Strasbourg in June, the French President went out of his way to snub the British Prime Minister by not sitting next to her at any meal. He also insisted on being served first, as head of state, instead of yielding this courtesy to Europe’s first woman leader, as most participants expected. ‘Silly of him’, said Carrington. ‘Everyone commented unfavourably.’
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The Strasbourg summit was not about slights against Margaret Thatcher, but about an issue of substance that she regarded as a high priority. It later became known as ‘The Bloody British Question’, or BBQ, although needless to say it was not so described in the Foreign Office briefing paper prepared for the Prime Minister by Sir Michael Butler, UK Representative to the European Community in Brussels.

Margaret Thatcher was dissatisfied with Butler’s paper, which she thought was too ready to make compromises on the question of Britain’s contribution to the community budget. So she commissioned an alternative briefing paper from the Treasury. Its author was a young Assistant Under Secretary, Peter Middleton, whom she summoned to Chequers to be interrogated on it. This was a testing experience, but he made such a favourable impression on the Prime Minister that it led to his meteoric rise, four years later, to the top job in his department as Permanent Secretary. For Middleton was the original architect of the case Margaret Thatcher launched at Strasbourg for the return of ‘our money’.

The ‘our money’ campaign had its roots in the complex imbalances between British import levies and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) benefits within the EU budget. It was common ground that those structural imbalances should be redressed by a budget rebate to Britain. What was not common ground was the amount of the rebate (£1 billion a year according to Middleton’s figures) and the priority that should be given to it.

Margaret Thatcher came to Strasbourg spoiling for a fight. She wanted the British budget rebate to be taken as the first item on the agenda, and to be separated from all the rest of the horse-trading on budgetary issues. This was not the Franco-German way of doing business. President Giscard d’Estaing and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt resented Margaret Thatcher’s nationalistic approach. They were dismissive towards her, and only grudgingly agreed to consider the issue at their next meeting.

Lord Carrington thought that the European leaders’ attitude to her was ‘Pretty stupid … enormously short-sighted and selfish’.
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By contrast, Margaret Thatcher was rather pleased with herself. ‘I felt that I had made an impression as someone who meant business’, she said.
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Between the Strasbourg summit in June and the next European Council at Dublin in November, the British Prime Minister sounded increasingly determined. She let it be known that she was considering withholding Britain’s VAT payments to the Community – which would have been illegal. Delivering the 1979 Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture in Luxembourg on 18 October, she described the treatment of Britain over the European Community budget as ‘demonstrably unjust’ and ‘politically indefensible’. She continued: ‘I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forgo improvements in the fields of health, education, welfare and the rest.’
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At the Dublin Council meeting in November, Sister Bountiful became Sister Aggressive. She was offered a £350 million rebate, which the Europeans thought was their first move in a bargaining negotiation. She rejected it contemptuously as ‘a third of a loaf’.
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Thereafter, she spent the rest of the evening upbraiding her fellow heads of government in what Carrington described as ‘a rant’,
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in a repetitious flow of rhetoric with the constant refrain, ‘It’s my money I want back’.
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Helmut Schmidt pretended to fall asleep. Giscard d’Estaing read a newspaper. According to Roy Jenkins, the President of the European Commission, ‘She kept us all round the dinner table for four interminable hours … She spoke without pause, but not without repetition … It was obvious to everyone except her that she wasn’t making progress and was alienating people.’
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The alienation was a two-way street. The friction of personalities was one problem. The lordly Giscard d’Estaing could not bear the over-loquacious lady he privately derided as ‘
la fille d’épicier
’. Helmut Schmidt was no less contemptuous of the anti-communitarian attitudes of the grocer’s daughter. He
walked out of the Dublin dinner shaking with rage saying: ‘I can’t stand this any longer … I can’t deal with someone like that.’
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But Margaret Thatcher was not flustered by either Gallic scorn or Teutonic tantrums. She was proud to be distrustful towards what she later called ‘The Franco-German carve up of Europe’.
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Deep in her psyche she was still the patriotic Grantham girl who remembered the war all too well. If she sounded like a Little Englander it was because that was her character. She saw everything through the prism of British interests, a position she and the majority of her electorate thought was entirely right and proper for a British Prime Minister.

The morning after the disastrous dinner in Dublin, Margaret Thatcher returned to the fray with still more detailed arguments on the unfairness of Britain’s treatment in the EEC budget. Five minutes before the final session of the summit broke up, she reluctantly agreed to a postponement of the issue until the next meeting in Luxembourg, which took place in April 1980. There she was offered a rebate of £750 million, which her Foreign Office advisers thought was a fair deal. To considerable astonishment, she turned it down flat on the grounds that it was only a two-year deal. This imperious ‘No’ to three-quarters of the loaf she had been seeking stunned her own team as much as the European leaders. Now it was Giscard’s turn to walk out in a bad temper. ‘I will not allow such a contemptible spectacle to occur again’, was his parting shot.
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Margaret Thatcher seemed to be enjoying her isolation. She told BBC Radio 4 that she was pleased that the Europeans were calling her a ‘she-de Gaulle’.
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She received a good reception to her statement on the Luxembourg summit from the House of Commons. The image of British Maggie giving the bureaucrats of Brussels a good handbagging
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played well across the country. It was also a welcome diversion from the economic troubles at home as well as the negotiating realities within the EEC. For domestic reasons of their own, the French and Germans were anxious to settle the budget question. For all the umbrage taken by the French and German leaders, the argument was about a comparatively
small amount of money measured against EEC finances. So on 30 May a new round of negotiations took place at the Council of Foreign Ministers – without Margaret Thatcher.