Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (69 page)

Despite her wan appearance and Libyan worries, Margaret Thatcher put on a sparkling performance at the book launch with elegant praise for both Bagehot and Norman St John-Stevas. It was the last friendly reception she received for some time.

Although the American airstrike was successful, the inevitable civilian casualties resulted in a dreadful public relations backlash. Even the Prime Minister’s most loyal ministers showed signs of rebellion. Complaints about the US action and about not being consulted as a cabinet came from Norman Tebbit, Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd, John Biffen and Kenneth Baker. But the Prime Minister stood firm, telling her colleagues: ‘This is the right decision in the long-term interests of Britain. The US keeps hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe to defend Europe. She is entitled to ask to use our bases.’
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If her reception in the cabinet was difficult, it was far rougher in the House of Commons on the afternoon following the raid. She was almost universally condemned with the tone set by the Liberal Party Leader, David Steel, who told the Prime Minister that she had turned ‘the British bulldog into a Reagan poodle’.
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As it happened, the only supportive voice on either side of the House was my own. I thanked her during Prime Minister’s Questions for ‘the difficult but wholly correct decision’.
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The rest was mostly hostility. After the exchanges, Ted Heath chided me far from pleasantly in the Members’ Lobby: ‘Sucking up to the headmistress, I suppose.’
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In fact, the ‘headmistress’ turned out to be vindicated by subsequent events. The outrage of Colonel Gaddafi’s rhetoric after the raid was followed by a noticeable decline in Libyan terrorism for several years. The indignation in Britain turned out to be ephemeral, whereas the gratitude from Washington was euphoric. President Reagan, whose poll approval ratings in the US soared to 77 per cent for his decision to authorise the air strike, was loud in his praise for his favourite ally. ‘PM Thatcher as always was right solidly behind us’, he said.
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The
New York Times
reflected the national mood with a front-page story headlined ‘Anglophilia Rules’.
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On Capitol Hill there was an unexpected bonus for British interests, when the Senate passed a revised US–British extradition treaty that removed the immunity for terrorists who claimed that their crimes had been politically motivated. This revision had been stuck in the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee since July 1985, thanks to Irish lobby support for IRA suspects seeking protection from extradition.

After Libya, that support crumbled and Reagan himself spelt out the message in a Radio Address to the Nation on Terrorism: ‘Rejection of this treaty would be an affront to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one European leader who at great political risk stood shoulder to shoulder with us during our operations against Gadhafi’s terrorism.’
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In that atmosphere the Senate ratified the UK–US Supplementary Extradition Treaty by eighty-seven votes to ten. President Reagan called Margaret Thatcher at a dinner party in London to give her the good news. He recorded in his diary, ‘She’s delighted’.
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REFLECTION

The Libyan episode need not have become the bellwether test of the ‘special relationship’, but it did. The United States could have inflicted just as much damage on Libyan compounds and installations from carrier-based aircraft, or from F-111s using longer in-flight refuelling arrangements. But there was something about Margaret Thatcher’s lonely courage in the face of public hostility towards their cause that won the hearts of the American people. She was already a standard bearer to political conservatives for her free-market economic policies.

Libya made her a popular heroine on a far wider front. Her instinctive belief, ‘that’s what Allies are for’, was a personal credo not a political calculation. It was the rock on which the equally instinctive Ronald Reagan built his trust in her.

Although there were to be other squalls and stormy moments in their partnership – not least over how to handle disarmament proposals to the Soviet Union – the foundations of that rock always stayed firm. Because of it, Margaret Thatcher has a special place in the history of the ‘special relationship’.

28

Starting to win the Cold War

WHY THE IRON LADY WAS FOR TURNING

A surprising visitor to No. 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1982 was the former US President Richard Nixon.
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He was still regarded as ‘disgraced’ in his own country as the scars from his resignation over Watergate were far from healed. But Margaret Thatcher held Nixon’s foreign-policy expertise in high esteem. So in their hour-long one-on-one talk she picked his brain on a subject he was well qualified to discuss – how to engage with the Soviet Union at a time when its Cold War rhetoric seemed more hostile to the West than ever before. Nixon advised her:

The Soviets will listen to you before they listen to us. They see you as strong, they see you as a tough right winger, which they always respect. They know you’ve got a lot of clout with our, frankly, inexperienced White House. With your credentials, you can bring a new realism into East–West relations which are right now stuck in a ruck.
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Nixon was skilful at flattering the British Prime Minister. He also had a perceptive feel for the statecraft of dealing with the Soviet Union. So Margaret Thatcher listened carefully to his advice, which included pithy one-liners such as: ‘Get to know your enemy’; ‘Find the young comers in the Kremlin’; ‘Unsettle the satellites’; ‘Contain, confront, and then be ready to make deals for hard headed détente’.
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The Nixon recommendations seem to have been heeded by Margaret Thatcher. They were a reminder that in this area of foreign policy the Iron Lady was a listening Lady. She may have been overly dismissive towards the predictable advice she received from the Foreign Office, but she did pay a lot of attention to her voices who spoke or wrote to her about the Soviet Union. Besides Nixon, they included Brian Crozier, Robert Conquest, Hugh Thomas, Robert Moss and the Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits. They were pushing at an unexpectedly open door to the Prime Minister’s mind. For, well ahead of most of her contemporaries, Margaret Thatcher instinctively felt that change was coming to the Soviet Union. She was searching for an agent of such change long before she met Mikhail Gorbachev.

The first tangible evidence of her search came when she organised a Chequers seminar on the Soviet Union in September 1983. Her reaction to the suggested list of invitees was contemptuous, as she minuted:

This is NOT the way I want it. I am not interested in gathering in every junior minister, nor everyone who has ever dealt with the subject at the FO. The FO must do their preparation before. I want also some people who have really studied Russia – the Russian mind – and who have some experience of living there. More than half the people on the list know less than I do.
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Accelerated by this prime ministerial prodding, the Chequers seminar assembled some outstanding people and papers. However, only one of them, Canon Michael Bourdeaux,
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dared to predict that, ‘We may one day see the collapse of the Soviet system from within’.
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The general summary, whose key sentence was underlined by Margaret Thatcher, concluded that although the Soviet leadership faced many problems, these were not ‘on such a scale as to compel them to change course drastically, still less change the system’.
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Despite this pessimism within the foreign-policy establishment, Margaret Thatcher reiterated her belief that somewhere within the monolithic and apparently immobile Soviet system there were individuals of spirit who wanted to bring about change. She mentioned in this context writers and dissidents.
But were there any kindred reformers within the government? Professor Archie Brown,
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one of the external Soviet experts invited to Chequers, reported that the newest and youngest member of the Politburo was ‘The most hopeful choice from the point of view of both Soviet citizens and the outside world’. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.

Identifying him at this early stage meant ‘our September seminar at Chequers was, therefore, more important than we knew’, according to the Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, who came to see Margaret Thatcher’s subsequent relations with Gorbachev as ‘her greatest achievement in Foreign Affairs’.
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At the time, however, the identification of Gorbachev was no more than a vaguely hopeful sighting on the long-distance radar screen of Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy. This was becoming more and more personalised. She kept her diplomatic cards increasingly tightly held within No. 10. In late 1983 she appointed a new private secretary, Charles Powell, who was to become her closest aide and confidant for the last seven years of her premiership.

Charles Powell had the appearance of a quintessentially Foreign Office man, but he appealed to Margaret Thatcher because of his steeliness of character and originality of mind. Moreover, his personal views were in harmony with her political purposes.

They first struck up a rapport in Bonn in 1975. She was making her first visit to Germany as Leader of the Opposition. It fell to Powell as First Secretary at the British Embassy to arrange her schedule. It culminated in them both sitting up late into the night to hear the result of the Woolwich West by-election – a surprise gain for the Conservatives which raised the leader’s spirits. Most of the talking that evening was done by the vivacious Mrs Carla Powell for whom Margaret Thatcher developed a life-long affection. She also took a favourable view of the thirty-three-year old Charles Powell, whose good looks, Oxford first and unorthodox opinions on the primacy of British national interests all impressed her.

The admiration was mutual. ‘From that visit I formed the view that Margaret Thatcher was a good thing’, he recalled. ‘I never shared the prevailing Foreign
Office wisdom that she was a ghastly, narrow middle-class housewife. I thought Britain needed her no-nonsense, reforming approach.’

During his next career stints as a Special Counsellor on the Rhodesia negotiations, and in Brussels as a Counsellor in the Office of the UK Representative to the European Community, Powell continued to catch the Prime Minister’s eye. In the latter job he managed to communicate his well-informed Euroscepticism to her. This might have impeded his progress on the career ladder of the Diplomatic Service. It did him a power of good when he was interviewed for the post of Foreign Affairs Private Secretary at No. 10.

She thought he ‘talked far too much’,
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but did not see any other candidate. Once appointed, Powell went from strength to strength. His rapport with his boss grew into an almost mystical bond based initially on shared political instincts and on the shared laughter and
joie de vivre
provided by Carla. The Prime Minister used to introduce her to guests at No. 10 receptions with the qualification, ‘She’s Italian, you know’.
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The vital ingredient in the bonding was Charles Powell’s talent for reading Margaret Thatcher’s mind. He then communicated it across Whitehall and the world in minutes, which conveyed her will-power in his linguistic power. This process became so perfected that in the words of one senior China expert at the FCO, Sir Percy Cradock, ‘It was sometimes equally difficult to establish where Mrs Thatcher ended and where Charles Powell began’.
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Less than a year after Powell joined the elite team of No. 10 private secretaries, Margaret Thatcher was flexing her wings with increasing vigour as a Prime Minister who was her own Foreign Secretary. She was taking more and more of her own foreign-policy initiatives, not least in the neglected field of East–West relations.

In February 1984, Margaret Thatcher made her first visit as Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. If her journey to Hungary was intended to be a move towards unsettling the satellites, it proved successful, and was followed by several later forays into the capital cities of Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In Budapest she was given what she called ‘A warm, even passionate, welcome’ from the shoppers in the central covered market.
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The experience, and some of her conversations with individual Hungarians, reaffirmed her belief that the thawing of the Cold War would come from establishing a warmer understanding of the societies in the pivotal countries behind the Iron Curtain.

Another influence on Margaret Thatcher’s willingness to engage with the Soviet Union at this time came through top-secret intelligence based on disclosures from Oleg Gordievsky. He was a senior KGB official who had become a double agent working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – MI6. Gordievsky reported only a few weeks earlier, in November 1983, that Soviet aircraft had moved to combat-readiness for a nuclear strike against the West. These astonishing preparations arose from a mistaken over-reaction to a routine NATO annual exercise code named ‘Able Archer 83’. The Soviet high command had wrongly concluded that the NATO war games were the prelude to a real war. Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to these top-secret reports was to conclude that the West needed far more effective channels of communication with Moscow.
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Ten days after her visit to Hungary, Margaret Thatcher travelled to Moscow to attend the funeral of the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, on 14 February 1984. On the flight, she immersed herself in the Foreign Office briefing papers, at one point making the comment: ‘Are there no young Russian leaders? They don’t seem to come out of the kindergarten until they’re 65.’
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At the long and cold obsequies for Andropov, Margaret Thatcher had a fortuitous encounter with the young Soviet leader who was to change the destiny of his country and the world. This was Mikhail Gorbachev, who paid her a small gesture of respect not because she was the British Prime Minister but because he noticed her courtesy at the funeral.

Under the Kremlin’s arrangements, visiting Western dignitaries were not allocated seats. They had to stand in a VIP enclosure in Red Square for over an hour as the funeral cortège and its military escort passed by. Most of the foreign leaders kept warm by stamping their feet and talking amongst themselves. Margaret Thatcher was freezing, too. But sensibly shod in fur-lined boots, she kept her distance from the other VIPs,
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standing alone in exemplary stillness and silence. Her respectful demeanour and her bows to the coffin were appreciated by Gorbachev.

A protégé of the deceased General Secretary, he was a rising figure in the Politburo, but virtually unknown in the West. At the end of the ceremonies, he approached the Prime Minister and gallantly escorted her to a warm room.
‘I remember how you took care of me. It was frosty and I was wearing thin stockings and a light suit’,
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she recalled on the next occasion they met.

Some hours after this encounter, Margaret Thatcher realised that her escort had been the man identified at her seminar as a potential future leader of the Soviet Union. So she intensified her efforts to invite him to visit Britain. For reasons of diplomatic protocol, this could only be done through the auspices of a somewhat obscure body, the Anglo-Soviet Parliamentary group chaired by the backbench Tory MP Sir Anthony Kershaw. ‘Who the hell is Mr Gorbachev?’
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demanded Sir Anthony, when asked to issue the invitation. It was accepted with alacrity by the recipient, despite some obstruction from Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister. ‘I had an unpleasant conversation with Gromyko’, Gorbachev recalled. ‘He would not delegate anybody to help prepare the visit, and would not send anyone on the trip with me. He thought the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not need that.’
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Back in Britain, Margaret Thatcher surprised her Foreign Office advisers by raising the status of Gorbachev’s mission. Instead of the customary short call at No. 10 that was granted to foreign political figures below the rank of head of government, she invited the intriguing Soviet visitor to Chequers for what turned into a five-hour lunch, attended by a galaxy of senior cabinet ministers, officials and Russian experts.

‘I knew exactly what she was doing’, recalled Gorbachev. ‘Our intelligence was very active in Britain. We knew that the government was trying to discern what would happen in the Soviet Union after General Secretary Chernenko,
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who was not expected to live for long by Margaret Thatcher. She had brought a doctor with her to Andropov’s funeral, and he had diagnosed Chernenko’s shortness of breath as chronic emphysema. This doctor gave her a prognosis on Chernenko’s life expectation which turned out to be remarkably accurate.’
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Although Gorbachev gives the credit for the arranging of his visit to British intelligence, it was just as much due to Margaret Thatcher’s political and personal intuition. She had sensed that her benefactor at Andropov’s funeral might turn
out to be a new kind of Soviet leader, with fresh ideas and a radical outlook. This was the reason she invited him to Britain and to Chequers. He so much exceeded her expectations that the Gorbachev visit became the opening move in a relationship that helped to change the world.

THE CHEQUERS OVERTURE TO MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

At 12.30 p.m. on 16 December 1984, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev arrived at Chequers for Sunday lunch with Margaret Thatcher. Charles Powell recalled:

It was an extraordinary moment. Nobody had much clue what to expect. Gorbachev came to us as a new member of the Politburo. He’d only been to the West before on a visit to Canada. Very intelligently, Mrs Thatcher invited him with his wife – it was a new departure for a Soviet leader to be travelling with his wife – and within seconds of him arriving in the Great Hall of Chequers you knew that this was an entirely different kind of Russian leader. Here was a man bursting with energy, beaming, bouncing on the balls of his feet, obviously proud of his smartly dressed wife, and ready to engage in argument. Everyone present just simply had to change gear.
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