Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (103 page)

The decision was ‘a bolt from the blue’, said Mrs Thatcher,
¹³⁹
and it made her ‘very, very angry’.
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During his visit to Europe, she had been absolutely clear with Reagan that she wanted to see the sanctions lifted. Instead, the President had actually extended them. Due in New York to make a speech about disarmament, she was invited to Washington to meet with Reagan, originally at the behest of Al Haig, and arrived there on 23 June.
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Despite the excellent relations between President and Prime Minister, the meeting was strained. As State Department officials reported to the US Embassy in London, Mrs Thatcher contrasted the US decision to continue grain sales to the Soviet Union with the decision on the pipeline: ‘She pointed out that the United States was getting a bad name internationally as a country which will not live up to its commitments.’
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Usually, to preserve her relationship with Reagan, Mrs Thatcher would avoid direct confrontation with him, picking instead on his advisers. ‘She would turn to the relevant Secretary or official and say “Bill, how could you ever go in that direction?” ’ recalled Judge Clark. ‘The President would sit there
with a catbird smile and roll his eyes as if to say, “Yes, Bill, how
could
you ever have done such a thing?” ’
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This time, however, her ire reached beyond Reagan’s aides. Thomas Niles, of the State Department, who attended the meeting, remembered it vividly:

The PM was in a bad mood. She was unhappy … She laid it all out. ‘This is just unacceptable … our companies cannot be put under US law.’

The real key moment during the meeting came when, unbeknownst to us, the NSC staff had prepared some material for the President. It essentially had him saying, ‘Look Margaret, we’ve talked to your company John Brown and they told us that this doesn’t bother them. They don’t really care.’ That was the point at which she really went ballistic. She told us to stop taking notes. ‘Put down your pencils,’ she said, and banged the table. I’ll never forget it. And she said to the President, ‘Ron, you talk to your companies and I’ll talk to mine.’ It was rough. It was not a very wise thing for the President to have said.

Reagan’s reaction was interesting: ‘The President was chagrined. Deeply. But I couldn’t say that he hesitated. He was gracious to a fault … but this was a matter of East–West relations. It really was one of those lines in the sand: you do not provide money to the Soviet Union.’
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‘The Prime Minister’s opposition was a source of puzzlement to the President,’ recalled Bud McFarlane, who at that time was Deputy National Security Advisor.
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‘She was strong in her convictions about containing the Soviet Union and ultimately rolling it back. So the President was struck by the inconsistency of her position … It was always in sorrow, not anger, but he never wavered.’
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For Mrs Thatcher, the episode was a shock, because it brought her up against the limits of her relationship with Reagan just at the moment when it seemed to be going so well. According to Clive Whitmore: ‘He had made up his mind … and having made up his mind on the main issues there wasn’t really very much concern about the repercussions for other people. I think this really did come as a bit of a blow for her. She was unable to make the good old personal relationship work in such a way that she could enlighten him.’ She also learnt something about Reagan himself that alarmed her.

I think she was really rather dismayed at how little understanding Reagan seemed to have of the issues. She had a remarkably detailed grasp of every aspect of this big policy question and it was quite plain that the President
didn’t … I think she for the first time was unhappy that he was unable to respond to her concerns … And so she began to take the view that well, maybe he wasn’t quite as intelligent as she had always held him out to be … He was a bear of very little brain. It was disappointing for her. You felt a significant change in her mood after the visit.

Her officials were faintly pleased. They had been telling her ‘for months and months’ that Reagan did not understand a great deal. Now, felt Whitmore, ‘The scales fell from her eyes.’
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The bickering continued through the summer. Mrs Thatcher wrote to Reagan to say that John Brown would indeed suffer severely following the US sanctions. He wrote back, maintaining his position that it would not. The disagreement was publicly known, with Mrs Thatcher characteristically taking her stand not on the rights and wrongs of the pipeline itself (she did not much like it), but on a rule-of-law argument that there could be no American jurisdiction over British companies.
¹⁴⁶
At the end of July, Mrs Thatcher wrote to Reagan to say that she would forbid four companies, including John Brown, from complying with American law. She did so, however, in a conciliatory tone: ‘I should like to stress that we are taking … no more than the absolute minimum action. I am very anxious that this matter should not be allowed to escalate and thus become a serious irritant in our relations … I would very much hope that your administration would respond in the same spirit.’ On his copy of this telegram, Reagan wrote, ‘We must keep our relationship on the level it is as exemplified by this message,’
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and he replied formally in similar vein. By September, the Pentagon had started to increase its own purchases from John Brown, as a sort of covert compensation.

There is no doubt that Mrs Thatcher’s displeasure did weigh with Reagan. Roger Robinson recalled: ‘The President felt the pressure of his relationship with Mrs Thatcher on this matter. He would ask us periodically about progress towards our goals. “Can we lift these damn things yet?” he would say.’
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But what really broke the impasse was Reagan’s decision to replace Secretary of State Al Haig with George Shultz
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at the end of June. Shultz recalled, ‘I said to President Reagan, “This is a wasting asset. As time goes on, our companies are all being engineered out of this project anyway. We should try to get what we can out of this.” ’ Shultz understood the wider context which worried Mrs Thatcher so much: ‘I had it very much in mind that the following year was going to be the year of
missile deployment in Europe. We couldn’t afford to go into that year with this dispute in the air, so we got it settled.’
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This was the case that Haig had put too, but Shultz, personally closer to Reagan and with new authority, was able to get a better hearing.

At the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in October, Shultz won agreement. In return for the lifting of American sanctions, the allies would develop a series of security-minded East–West economic policies. There would be a review of energy alternatives for Western Europe and no new Soviet gas-supply contracts signed. ‘I worked out a deal whereby we got a beefed-up agreement among the like-minded countries not to sell things to the Russians. Margaret was very co-operative with that. The proposed settlement was something that she agreed with and so she was an ally in that sense, although she was opposed to the sanctions.’
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Many hawks opposed Shultz’s agreement. ‘I don’t know that this is enough to give up the pipeline sanctions,’ said Cap Weinberger,
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but Shultz prevailed. Face was saved.
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On 13 November 1982, Reagan announced that the sanctions would be lifted. The hawks stressed the delay they had caused to the pipeline and the additional costs imposed on the Soviets. They also noted that construction of a proposed second strand to the pipeline had been suspended indefinitely. The view in the British Embassy, however, was that the Americans had suffered a great defeat, although officials were given strict instructions not to say so.
¹⁵²
John Brown would now be permitted to sell its equipment to Moscow after all and pipeline construction would proceed. Mrs Thatcher sent a telegram to Reagan. The lifting of sanctions was ‘very good news’, she said, ‘I am pleased that we have all been able to reach agreement on a common approach to the handling of East/West relations, particularly at a time when we must be seen to be standing together.’
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The pipeline episode proved the untruth of the accusation that Mrs Thatcher was ever the poodle of the United States. She argued her case with a frankness and tenacity which caused shock in Washington. And she did, after ten months of wrangling, prevail. The alliance stayed intact, and ready for the much more important business of INF deployment in Europe
the following year. But the row forced Mrs Thatcher to be more realistic about her greatest ally, and to be aware that, even with her prestige as high as it was at the end of the Falklands War, she could not expect an easy ride.

Three days before Reagan announced the lifting of sanctions, Leonid Brezhnev, the President of the Soviet Union, died. The Foreign Office sent Mrs Thatcher a draft of the proforma letter of condolence that she was to send. In her own hand, she deleted anything suggestive of grief, and added the sentence, ‘The consequences of his death will be felt far beyond the frontiers of his own country.’
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It was intended as an optimistic prophecy, not a funerary platitude. She was looking to the future, and hoping for change.

By the time Mrs Thatcher became prime minister, she did not have a policy towards Northern Ireland. It had died with Airey Neave just as the election campaign began. As well as the loss of a friend and ally, Neave’s death was, she recalled, ‘a terrible blow, because I’d never thought of anyone else for Northern Ireland … He understood the “Irish factor”. He’d studied it.’
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She considered Humphrey Atkins, whom she made secretary of state, ‘a very nice person’
²
and was even said by some to have a
tendresse
for him, but he did not want the job,
³
and knew nothing about the subject. Mrs Thatcher, and not Atkins, would therefore be the one to give a lead on Northern Ireland, but she herself did not know very much either.

More important, she had little feel for the problem. She did not go so far as Denis, who had an English, saloon-bar impatience with the whole thing: ‘If the Irish want to kill each other that does seem to me to be their business.’
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Indeed, Mrs Thatcher was, in principle, a strong Unionist, but she nevertheless possessed what Robert Armstrong, whose part in the Irish drama was to prove central, called ‘a very English Englishness’,
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and little natural rapport with the people whose cause she believed she favoured. She admired what she regarded as the thrifty attitudes of Ulster people, and, as Secretary of State for Education (although schools were a matter devolved to the Northern Ireland government at Stormont), she had been impressed by what little she had seen of the province’s educational standards.
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But she was an outsider looking in. In private conversation, she had a rather revealing way of expressing her attitude: ‘Airey was a convinced Unionist and, in a way, so was I, because they had been jolly loyal to us.’
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She always thought of the people of Northern Ireland, even the Unionist population, as ‘they’, quite separate from ‘us’.

In addition, she found the Irish, on both sides, irritating – their preference for cultural politics over the more clear-cut economic debates at Westminster, their prolixity and what she believed to be their unreliability. ‘You don’t expect anything decent to come from an Irishman,’ she said in
private,
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and she was only half in jest. She also found it extremely hard to take in the idea that citizens of her own country might feel that they owed allegiance to another. In private conversation in retirement, she once said that Nationalists in the North were ‘traitors’ because of their wish for British withdrawal and a united Ireland. Then she stopped herself: ‘No, no. I shouldn’t say that. That is not the right word.’
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But she never worked out what the right word was. The whole business upset her. In her memoirs, it is this tone of crossness and exasperation which dominates when she writes about Northern Ireland. As with all important questions of policy, she treated it with care and attention, and worked hard at it. She was invariably brave in the face of threats of violence, and felt a strong rapport with all those, especially soldiers and policemen, who had to deal with terrorism. Almost her first intervention on the subject of Northern Ireland after coming into office was to take up a letter from a member of the public who complained that British troops in the province were ill equipped (‘we must take this
very seriously indeed
’).
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But, unlike economic matters, or East–West relations, Northern Ireland was a subject which, though she would not have put it so, she wished would go away.

Airey Neave was a famously secretive man, and his attitude to Northern Ireland will forever be disputed. Some believed that he had become a convinced integrationist, arguing that the province should be administered in the same way as other parts of the United Kingdom. If this was his position, it would have been momentous, had he had the chance to act on it. It would have reversed the policy, pursued in one way or another since the partition of Ireland in 1921, by which Northern Ireland was treated as a place apart. Even after British troops arrived to restore order in the province in 1969, and the Unionist-dominated Stormont Parliament was replaced by direct rule from London in 1972, the prevailing British orthodoxy was that Northern Ireland should be governed, though still under the Crown, by different rules from those prevailing in Westminster. Devolution and ‘power-sharing’, which ensured places in government for both sides of the community, were considered sacred, even if, because of conflict, they were usually suspended in favour of direct rule. Others thought, however, that Neave was more pragmatic, and, seeing how the power-sharing devolution established by the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 had collapsed, was simply taking things very slowly and cautiously.
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The wording of the Conservative election manifesto of 1979 captured Neave’s deliberate
ambiguity: ‘In the absence of devolved government, we will seek to establish one or more elected regional councils with a wide range of powers over local services.’ These actually quite non-committal words gave heart to Unionists in Ulster and within the Tory Party, because they appeared to encourage the idea that the province could return to governing itself, at least in local matters, without the imposition of power-sharing or the intervention of the Irish Republic. But they did not constitute a veto on devolution.