Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (60 page)

Before she snatched a couple of hours of sleep, Margaret Thatcher could only think of one thing to do. ‘Crawfie and I knelt by the side of our beds and prayed for some time in silence.’
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While the Prime Minister took her brief rest, Robin Butler manned the telephone, and pieced together the news coming in from the police and party officials at the scene of the bombing. When she emerged from her room, he briefed her: ‘Prime Minister, I’m afraid it’s far worse than we supposed. Bodies have been taken from the wreckage. They are digging the injured Norman Tebbit out now.’
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From watching breakfast television news, Margaret Thatcher learned more about the night’s casualties. Anthony Berry MP was dead and so was Roberta Wakeham, the wife of the Chief Whip. John Wakeham was still trapped with his legs crushed under debris. Norman Tebbit was being hauled out of the rubble in excruciating pain, along with his wife, Margaret. News of three other fatalities and many more injuries were being continuously reported. Turning away from this harrowing television coverage, Margaret Thatcher said to Robin Butler: ‘Well, it’s eight o’clock. The conference must begin on time at 9.30, and I must be there.’

He could not believe what he was hearing. ‘Prime Minister, you can’t be serious. People have been killed. You can’t just go on with the conference as if nothing has happened.’

Without hesitation Margaret Thatcher answered, ‘This is our opportunity to show that terrorism can always be beaten by democracy.’
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The strength of her instincts overruled all other considerations.

On the dot of 9.30, the Prime Minister made her entrance into the Conference Centre and was greeted with an outpouring of emotional applause by the delegates, roaring their relief that she was still alive. Once the tears and cheers had receded, the emphasis from the platform was business as usual. Appropriately, but coincidentally, the first scheduled debate of the morning was about Northern Ireland. It was followed later by the leader’s speech, which had to be massively rewritten by Ronnie Millar and the team of writers. Out went the traditional knockabout of jokes and jibes against the opposition. In came solemnity, a denunciation of terrorism and an appeal for national unity. She struck all the right notes:

The bomb attack … was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference. It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared. And the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
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This Churchillian defiance captured the mood of the nation as well as the conference. Margaret Thatcher’s coolness under fire won universal acclaim. She reflected what Britain wanted its Prime Minister to be at a time of such crisis – a beacon of courage and a symbolic assurance that the IRA would not be allowed to triumph.

For all her visible resolution in the hours after the attack, Margaret Thatcher was invisibly affected by the Brighton bombing. In the short term, she suffered the predictable reactions of shock and emotion that she had not allowed herself to display in her superbly professional television interviews and in her conference speech.

When she returned to Chequers, after visiting the injured in the Royal Sussex County Hospital, her feelings started to show. In the Intensive Care Unit, the sight of Norman and Margaret Tebbit shook her. She could only just recognise her Secretary of State for Trade and Industry as he croaked a few words through his swollen lips and face. His wife managed to communicate that she had no feeling below the neck, which they both knew meant permanent paralysis. Over dinner that evening, Margaret Thatcher told Denis that she feared she would always be haunted by the thought that Margaret Tebbit’s fate might have been her fate.
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This mood of shock at the narrowness of her survival lasted for some time. On Sunday morning the Prime Minister went to church and was seen wiping away her tears during prayers.
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By the time she returned to Chequers, Carol had flown in from Australia. She found her mother sitting on the terrace ‘calm but seemed still shaken’. After describing the events at Brighton she said, ‘This is the day I was not meant to see.’
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Denis appeared equally subdued. He rarely let his spiritual or emotional feelings show, but after this experience he wrote several letters to well-wishers with a line about the near miss: ‘I like to think God had a hand in it.’
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A few days afterwards he bought his wife a watch and gave it to her with a note: ‘Every minute is precious.’
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The closeness of the brush with death left no lasting mark on Margaret Thatcher. Some observers felt that the episode decreased her self-confidence and increased her remoteness, but the evidence for this is slender. A better view is that her spirits were shaken – but not for long. She was on the road to recovery as early as ten days after the attack telling her Finchley constituents, on the
twenty-fifth anniversary of her election as their MP, ‘We picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do.’
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THE ANGLO-IRISH AGREEMENT

One matter related to terrorism which needed a lot of sorting out in the aftermath of Brighton was a top-secret diplomatic initiative which she had authorised the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to explore with his opposite number in Dublin, Dermot Nally. Their talks led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which laid the foundations for later historic developments.

How this began and brought about the first major breakthrough in Anglo-Irish relations for half a century is a fascinating story that says much about the quieter subtleties of Thatcherite statecraft.

A year after winning the 1979 election, Margaret Thatcher became the first British Prime Minister ever to welcome an Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) at No. 10 Downing Street. She was wary of her guest, Charles Haughey, the leader of the Fianna Fail governing party. He was known to have held sympathies for Republicanism in the North, which had led to him being tried and acquitted of importing arms for the IRA in the early 1970s.

Despite this inauspicious background, the Prime Minister and the Taoiseach struck up a good rapport. Blarney was a trademark of Charlie Haughey, and he excelled himself in the art of it when handing his hostess a farewell gift. For he presented her with a tea set complete with a silver spoon, inscribed with the words, ‘Where there is discord may we bring harmony’. This was the opening line of the prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi, which Margaret Thatcher had declaimed from the doorstep on No. 10 on the day she became Prime Minister.

Although her political sympathies about bringing harmony to Northern Ireland lay instinctively with the Ulster Unionists, Margaret Thatcher had also experienced good reasons for being disenchanted with them. She knew she should not keep all her eggs in the Belfast basket. So the teaspoon of charm from the Taoiseach, plus some nudging from the Foreign Office, took her to a bilateral summit in Dublin – another first for a British Prime Minister – in December 1980.

The Haughey charm continued to cast its spell over Margaret Thatcher. The summit was high powered, attended on the British side by the Foreign Secretary (Lord Carrington), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Sir Geoffrey Howe)
and the Northern Ireland Secretary (Humphrey Atkins). More surprisingly, the communiqué issued at the end of these deliberations broke new ground in diplomatic effusiveness. It made a British commitment to give ‘special consideration to the totality of relationships between these islands’.
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Margaret Thatcher was subsequently embarrassed by these words. ‘You have destroyed my credibility with the Unionists’,
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she complained to the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Northern Ireland Office, Sir Kenneth Stowe, who had drafted them. When she returned to London she engaged in some damage limitation with the Orangemen, writing an appeasing letter to Ian Paisley, and telling the pro-Unionist Ian Gow that she had been ‘tripped up by the Foreign Office’.
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But, for all such fence mending, the Dublin summit was a turning point for Margaret Thatcher. Kenneth Stowe, in whom she had special trust because he had been her first Private Secretary at No. 10 before moving to the Northern Ireland Office, took this view of her reaction to it:

This summit was the start of the peace process. For the first time, the Prime Minister saw that the relationship between London and Dublin was more important than the relationship between London and Belfast. This was a hard lesson for her to learn, but she got it. She realised that the troubles in Northern Ireland were not a problem that could be solved by Belfast and the British Army. She understood, even though she grumbled about it, that the words in the communiqué about ‘the totality of relationships’ were the beginning of wisdom.
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The wisdom took a while to take root, not least because Margaret Thatcher became contemptuous of Charlie Haughey and his government for their anti-British statements during the Falklands War. But the election of a new Irish government and Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, improved the climate. Taking the view that secret diplomacy might achieve progress, the Prime Minister authorised her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to float a proposal to the Irish Cabinet Secretary, Dermot Nally. It was helpful that the two mandarins were already friends.

The first proposal filtered through this back channel was that the border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland should be changed from a line to a band, five miles wide on both sides, on which police and security forces could operate when in hot pursuit of terrorist or criminal suspects. Although the Irish
government rejected the idea, the fact that such a serious proposal had been put forward by the British made the Irish use the Armstrong–Nally talks as a vehicle for negotiations on other substantive issues. In no time, the two principals and their aides were meeting every two weeks.

The early cloak and dagger conditions included promises that there would be no records of the oral discussions. There would also be hush-hush arrangements for travel on false passports, and James Bond-like assignations. Nally’s instructions to the Deputy Cabinet Secretary, Robert Wade-Gery, were:

When you get to Dublin airport, take a taxi to your hotel, and at a quarter to nine the next morning, you walk along a particular street in Dublin, which is past the wall of the Taoiseach’s garden, and, if it’s exactly quarter to nine, the door will open as you walk past it, you step in, it’ll close behind you, and we can negotiate all day.
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The Prime Minister, despite what Wade-Gery described as her ‘intense suspicion’
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of these negotiations between officials, allowed them to continue. She imposed two conditions. First, they were only to be conducted at their initial stages at the Cabinet Office, with no involvement by the Foreign Office or the Northern Ireland Office. Second, there were to be no suggestions of shared or diluted British sovereignty. ‘Her rock was sovereignty’, Robert Armstrong recalled. ‘Nothing was permissible which would weaken or impair Britain’s sovereignty over Northern Ireland.’
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The Brighton terrorist attack caused a nervous hiatus in the rounds of secret diplomacy. Margaret Thatcher hated to give any possible impression that she was being ‘bombed to the negotiating table’.
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Nevertheless, she did agree to go ahead with an Anglo-Irish summit at Chequers on 7 November 1984. She was developing a growing respect for the new Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald. Even so, their summitry came close to being a disaster because of her aggressive statements at the final press conference, on a tangential matter.

The matter arose because shortly before the summit a private Dublin think tank, the New Ireland Forum, published a report. Although it had no imprimatur from the Irish government and no direct connection with the Chequers agenda, its proposals were considered newsworthy. This report, a document of considerable earnestness and complexity, had suggested various forms of new constitutional architecture that might eventually end the troubles. Its ideas were liked more in Dublin than in London, but given its opaque language and its
distant timescale, the report’s contribution to the discussion could easily have been kicked into the long grass. Margaret Thatcher, however, preferred to give it another kind of kicking.

When asked about the findings of the New Ireland Forum at a post-summit press conference, she oversimplified them down to three solutions: unification, confederation or administrating the province by joint authority. In a disparaging tone of voice accompanied by an even more dismissive flicking of her wrist, she rubbished all three. ‘That is out … That is out … That is out!’
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The Irish media immediately denounced her. Dr Garret FitzGerald described the British Prime Minister’s language as ‘gratuitously offensive’.
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She pretended not to understand what the fuss was about. Anglo-Irish relations fell to a new low. The British Ambassador in Dublin was even warned that tolerance for the IRA would grow in Ireland and that the fight against terrorism had been weakened. But these appearances were deceptive.

It was Margaret Thatcher’s practice, when she knew she had over-reacted, to make a conciliatory move rather than to offer an apology. So she extended an olive branch to Dr FitzGerald and re-engaged in further talks with him. She was never an enthusiast for a formal Anglo-Irish Agreement. All she really wanted from Dublin was better co-operation on security. But after pressure from leading members of the US Congress and President Reagan, she reluctantly agreed to allow the government of the Irish Republic not just the right to be consulted on Northern Ireland governance, but a new right to have a permanent role in it. The machinery for this would be a commission jointly chaired by Irish and British ministers with a presence and secretariat in Belfast. This was the centre-piece of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which the Prime Minister and Taoiseach signed on 15 November 1985 at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland.
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