Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (61 page)

The circumstances of the signing were unsettling. ‘Margaret was caught very much on the hop by the hostility of the reactions to it’, recalled Tom King, who she had appointed as her new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland some six weeks earlier. ‘The essence of the deal was that it had been negotiated in deepest secrecy, largely through the Armstrong–Nally
^*
channel, and it was
presented in Northern Ireland as a complete
fait accompli
. Of course, the Unionists and their supporter were bound to be furious, but she was surprised by the extent of the fury.’
⁴³

One unwelcome dimension to her surprise was the resignation from the government of Ian Gow, her former PPS, now a Minister of State at the Treasury. When the Prime Minister arrived at Hillsborough Castle, the first thing she did was to go to an upstairs bedroom and telephone Ian Gow. Her efforts to persuade this staunch advocate of the Unionist cause not to leave his post were unsuccessful. Part of her admired his principled stance, but it upset her on the day.

At the signing ceremony, Garret FitzGerald caused his own surprise by speaking in Gaelic. ‘Margaret kept wondering what on earth he might be saying’, recalled Tom King. ‘I murmured to her “Could it be ‘We’ve won?” ’

Meanwhile there was no doubt what the Unionists were saying. ‘All hell was breaking loose outside the gates of Hillsborough’, said King. ‘The Unionists were creating a tremendous noise of hammering and shouting. This protest made it difficult to hear what was being said inside.’
⁴⁴

The protests went on and on. The Unionist parties had never expected that she would go behind their backs and strike a bargain with Dublin. Their sense of betrayal was personal. ‘British we are, and British we shall remain’, bellowed the Reverend Ian Paisley at a mass demonstration against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Belfast on 24 November. ‘Now Mrs Thatcher says that the Republic must have a say in our province, we say “never, never, never, never”.’
⁴⁵

Paisley’s Deputy, Peter Robinson, called the Agreement ‘this act of political prostitution’.
⁴⁶
Using the rapier rather than the bludgeon, Enoch Powell chillingly asked her in the House of Commons if she realised that ‘the penalty for treachery is to fall into public contempt?’ She retorted that she found his remarks ‘deeply offensive’.
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The unkindest cut of all remained Ian Gow’s resignation, which also turned out to be his death warrant. His stand against the Hillsborough agreement made him a marked man. The IRA eventually murdered him in 1990 by a bomb placed under his car in the garage of his constituency home in Eastbourne. It was the most personal loss in a long chain of bombings and other tragic events. Margaret Thatcher had increasing doubts as to whether she had been right to sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

By chance, I had a conversation with the Prime Minister at a family reception immediately after Ian Gow’s funeral in August 1990, near his home in Sussex. She was as upset as I had ever seen her. Our talk was mainly about Ian’s extraordinary personal qualities, which she was kind enough to say I had captured well in the obituary I had written in the
Guardian
a week earlier. But in an indirect reference to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, she remarked: ‘We’re just not getting the security and intelligence cooperation we should be getting from Dublin on the IRA.’
⁴⁸

This negative view of the way the Agreement was working came to prey on Margaret Thatcher’s mind. By the time she published her memoirs in 1993, she had convinced herself that it had been a mistake. She described the results as ‘… disappointing. Our concessions alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security cooperation we had a right to expect.’
⁴⁹

This was a premature judgement. She built better foundations for peace than she saw at the time.

ACCEPTING REALITY IN HONG KONG

The deal with the Irish government at Hillsborough in 1985 was not the only international agreement Margaret Thatcher signed against her instincts. Another ‘problem left over from history’, as the Chinese called it,
⁵⁰
was the future of Hong Kong. The way the Prime Minister approached the issue, argued over it, mishandled it, eventually settled it and then privately condemned her own decisions revealed much about her personality.

The first meeting at which Margaret Thatcher applied her mind to Hong Kong was held at No. 10 on 28 July 1982; two days after the Falklands Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s Cathedral. As Sir Geoffrey Howe put it: ‘No one had been relishing the idea of telling the Prime Minister, who had just triumphantly reasserted sovereignty over the Falklands, that she must now consider relinquish- ing it over Hong Kong.’
⁵¹

The Foreign Secretary and his team of officials who were experts on the colony had considerable difficulty in persuading the Prime Minister to enter a mind-set in which British sovereignty would have to be surrendered. But as 92 per cent of Hong Kong’s territory was British by virtue of a lease from China, due to expire in 1997, it was completely unrealistic to argue that the remaining
8 per cent, Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, could survive as a colonial outpost on their own.

Despite the unreality of such arguments, Margaret Thatcher embarked on them ‘in a combative and uncooperative spirit’,
⁵²
according to the wisest old China hand in Whitehall, Sir Percy Cradock. She eventually became so impressed by Cradock that she installed him in No. 10 as her personal adviser on foreign affairs. But at the start of her investigations into the problem of Hong Kong, she rubbished the recommendations given by him and the rest of the Foreign Office.

Instead of working out a negotiating position from which to start discussions with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Prime Minister suggested that Hong Kong Island and the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula might be retained in perpetuity. She said, apparently seriously, that she did not see why it could not be defended by the British Army. She also insisted that Britain’s legal rights to the tiny ‘freehold’ remnant of Hong Kong were unassailable. The Chinese took the opposite view of the treaties granting these rights, which had been signed between the government of Queen Victoria and the Qing dynasty in the 1840s. In any case, Beijing held all the de facto cards once the lease expired in 1997.

In addition to her remarkable assertions that Britain was in a position of military and legal strength over Hong Kong, Margaret Thatcher floated several other original ideas for the future of the colony, such as UN trusteeship, and joint rule with China. She pretended that any concessions of sovereignty to the PRC were out of the question. To maintain this impossible position she embarked on a series of discussions with her advisers, which were described as ‘unstructured and abrasive’.

According to Cradock, ‘The Prime Minister conducted a species of guerrilla warfare; appearing suddenly behind the lines, or firing from unconventional angles. She also often operated behind a smokescreen of her own making.’
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Behind the smokescreen lay a pressing engagement with reality. A summit meeting with China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, was scheduled for 24 September in Beijing. It was not a happy or successful visit for Margaret Thatcher. She was suffering from a bad cold. On the first morning of the talks she had a nasty fall on the steps of the Great Hall of the People, which was seen by many superstitious Chinese as a bad omen for the British.

Their superstitions were not all that wide of the mark. Deng reacted negatively to the arguments put forward by the Prime Minister. He was immovable on the issue of Hong Kong returning to Chinese sovereignty. He became angry when she suggested she could only consider this when the two governments had agreed arrangements that would be acceptable to Hong Kong and to the British Parliament. Rejecting this with some forcefulness, Deng said he was prepared to wait one or two years for consultations to take place, but after that China would announce its own decisions. Deng’s toughness and his personal habits – chain smoking and frequent expectorations of phlegm into a spittoon – repelled Margaret Thatcher, who thought him ‘cruel’.
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The impasse was unblocked after several months by ‘the first finesse’.
⁵⁵
This was the Foreign Office’s description of a revised wording for the Prime Minister’s views on the sovereignty question. At the Beijing summit in September 1982, Margaret Thatcher had spoken of being ready in certain circumstances to ‘consider’ making recommendations to Parliament on sovereignty. By March 1983, she shifted her position to say that she ‘would be prepared to recommend to Parliament’. This minor change caused her much heart searching and the revisiting of absurd alternatives, such as the military defence of Hong Kong Island and holding a UN-supervised referendum as a prelude for independence. But in the end, she reluctantly agreed to the first finesse, declaring it to be ‘her last word’. It was conveyed in a letter to the Chinese Prime Minister, Zhao Ziyang, who evidently appreciated such delicate nuances. The talks restarted.

For the next twelve months, a complex diplomatic minuet was played out mainly between officials in London, Beijing and Hong Kong. Sir Geoffrey Howe, who could be as inscrutable as any Chinese mandarin, used his skills to particularly good effect in the negotiations. They progressed not because of Margaret Thatcher’s continuing interest, but in spite of it. She had at least one more lurch towards the politically insane option of granting independence to the freehold parts of Hong Kong. But the saner possibilities had an influential voice in her closest counsels when in January 1984 Sir Percy Cradock moved into No. 10 as Foreign Affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister.

It says a great deal about her criteria for selecting important members of her staff that Margaret Thatcher chose Cradock for this key role. He was an archetypal Foreign Office diplomat, a member of the Labour Party and he
held opposite views to hers on many foreign-policy subjects, not least on Hong Kong.

‘It was because of her sheer respect for his formidable intellect’,
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said David Wilson, later appointed as Governor of Hong Kong. He was a member of the negotiating team that, under Cradock’s leadership, wrestled with the Chinese and English texts of the proposed agreement known as the Joint Declaration.

Although there were many difficult issues to be resolved, in the end the Prime Minister accepted the advice of Sir Percy Cradock and the Foreign Office.

‘It was the real mark of quality in Margaret Thatcher that even when all her emotions were against it, and she had tried every possible form of questioning and saying “couldn’t we do it some other way”, she was steady when it was time to take a decision that really mattered’, recalled David Wilson. ‘It was then that the self-flagellation ended and she came to the right conclusions.’
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The final round of negotiations went right to the wire. The Foreign Secretary performed brilliant acts of brinkmanship in Beijing on the eve of his meeting with Deng Xiaoping on 31 July 1984, while the Prime Minister kept asking for more in telegrams from London. She hated the process of making concessions on points such as the remit and location of the Joint Liaison Group tasked with preparing for the handover in 1997. But the mission was accomplished more successfully than she realised at the time. The deal, encapsulated in Deng’s phrase ‘one country, two systems’, provided Hong Kong with a stability, prosperity and continuity that served it well in its final years as a British colony, and as an autonomous region of China ever since.

‘It was an
excellent
result – progress beyond all expectations’ was Margaret Thatcher’s verdict on the finalisation of the negotiations. Her last act was to sign the historic agreement in Beijing on 19 December 1984. On the flight from London she recited, in concert with Sir Percy Cradock and Robin Butler, the concluding lines from Tennyson’s
Ulysses
, which all three of them knew by heart:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The Tennysonian spirit seemed, at the time, a fair verdict on Britain’s negotiation of the Hong Kong agreement. But it was not Margaret Thatcher’s final opinion. She became retrospectively angry for having signed it.

In January 1987 she gave an astonishing ventilation of her regrets at a No. 10 meeting with Sir David Wilson. He had just been appointed to be the penultimate Governor of Hong Kong. Wilson recalled:

There was no question of her giving me any guidance or instructions on how I should do my job as Governor. All she wanted to do was to rail on and on about the Hong Kong Agreement. She kept saying what a mistake it had been, and how terrible it was. Percy Cradock was there, and he interrupted her every so often to say, ‘But Prime Minister, you agreed to this, and you were quite right.’ She took no notice of him, pouring out her emotional feelings against the Chinese. I think she just wanted to get off her chest how much she had hated giving Hong Kong away and signing the agreement.

The emotional Margaret Thatcher and the realistic Prime Minister were two sides of her personality. With Hong Kong it was both inevitable and right that realism won in the end.

REFLECTION

Ireland and Hong Kong were not seen by Margaret Thatcher as foreign-policy successes. ‘Like Calais for Mary Tudor, they were written on her heart’,
⁵⁸
said Charles Powell, who listened to more than his fair share of prime ministerial rants on these subjects.

It was a strange failing in Margaret Thatcher to underestimate two such important parts of her legacy.

With Hong Kong she held virtually no cards, yet by blustering and bluffing she secured better arrangements for the handover of the colony than any of her advisers initially expected. Her appointment of Sir Percy Cradock was a vivid illustration of her willingness to give priority to excellence, even if it was contrarian excellence in relation to her own instincts.