The Iron Lady

before.

She was relieved when Vice-President George Bush trounced the Democrat Michael Dukakis in November 1988 to ensure continuity of Republican rule. But she would never have the same rapport with Bush that she had with Reagan. She was now the senior partner, but Bush, unsurprisingly, had no wish to be patronised. Guided by a new team of advisers – James Baker as Secretary of State, Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense, Brent Scowcroft as National Security Adviser – he determined to make his own alliances. In particular, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush had identified Helmut Kohl as the European leader with whom he should forge a special relationship. With Mrs Thatcher it was necessary for him to show that he was his own man.

Bush’s relations with his European allies are fully documented in A World Transformed, his remarkably candid joint memoir written with Brent Scowcroft, which reprints a lot of documents, transcripts of telephone conversations and diary accounts of the intense diplomacy accompanying the end of the Cold War – far more than has yet received security clearance at the Bush Library in Texas.[o] From this there emerges a vivid picture of the tensions between the leading players and the extent of Mrs Thatcher’s isolation as Bush and Kohl, with much less objection than she hoped for from Mitterrand and Gorbachev, rushed to consummate the reunion of the two Germanies far faster than she thought wise or desirable.

Even before the heady events of November, however, from the very beginning of Bush’s presidency she was afraid that Washington was going soft on nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev was trying to split NATO by offering cuts to prevent the alliance modernising its short-range nuclear forces (SNF). Kohl, under domestic pressure from the Social Democrats and Greens, wanted to delay modernisation and reduce the number of missiles immediately. By contrast, Scowcroft wrote, ‘Thatcher was unyielding on any changes that might weaken NATO defences.’⁵ She wanted the Americans to let her handle Kohl, which they were unwilling to do – partly because ‘Margaret… was even more unyielding than we, and far more emotional about the dangers of compromise’, but also because Bush was not willing to play second fiddle to her.

She was very annoyed when Kohl’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, tried to ‘bounce’ the alliance into SNF cuts by announcing them in the Bundestag before they had been agreed. She gave Bush her views in a telephone conversation which he described as ‘vintage Thatcher’: ‘We must be firm with Germany… There could be no question, no question, she repeated, of negotiations on SNF.’⁶

But the Americans did change their position on SNF negotiations. Mrs Thatcher, Scowcroft recalled, was ‘not happy… particularly since we had not consulted with her beforehand’:

The truth of the matter was that we knew what Thatcher’s reaction would be… We believed we had to make this gesture to the Germans… and, had we consulted the British, it would have been very awkward to proceed over their strong objections.⁷

Before the May 1989 NATO summit in Brussels she was still ‘unhappy and apprehensive’ about the American proposal for immediate cuts in conventional forces, linked to SNF negotiations; but at the end of the day she knew the limits of her influence. She told the envoys who came to brief her in London, ‘If the President wants it, of course we will do it.’⁸ Yet even as they sat down to dinner in Brussels she buttonholed Bush. ‘We must not give in on this,’ she told him. ‘You’re not going to give in, are you?’ In the end James Baker and the Foreign Ministers – still Howe for Britain – found a form of words she could accept. ‘Our strategy of using our conventional forces proposal to encourage a deal over the nuclear forces problem worked,’ Bush wrote.The next morning, to his relief, ‘Margaret waxed enthusiastic. I suspect she did not want to be separated from the United States.’⁹ But while the Americans congratulated themselves on ‘a resounding success’, the press had no doubt that Mrs Thatcher had suffered a humiliating defeat.¹⁰

The next day Bush went on to Germany and delivered a speech at Mainz in which he referred to West Germany and the United States as ‘partners in leadership’. Mrs Thatcher took this as a snub to her special relationship with Washington. ‘In truth she need not have worried,’ Scowcroft wrote. ‘The expression had no exclusionary intent and was meant only for flourish and encouragement.’¹¹ Nevertheless it was widely interpreted as reflecting a real and important shift in transatlantic relationships. Bush tried to make up by describing Britain as America’s ‘anchor to windward’. ‘This was kindly meant, but not exactly reassuring,’ Percy Cradock commented.‘The anchor to windward is a lonely position and not the one we had imagined we occupied.’¹²

At least one special relationship did persist, however, between Scowcroft and Charles Powell, whom Scowcroft regarded as ‘my opposite in the British Government’. Secure lines were installed so that the National Security Adviser could speak directly to his counterparts in London, Paris and Bonn. ‘All either one of us had to do was to push a button and lift the receiver to have the phone ring on the other’s desk… We soon learned how to explore in a comfortable, offhand manner the limits of the flexibility we felt our principals would have on various issues.’ Scowcroft felt that by this time Powell was ‘the only serious influence on Thatcher’s views on foreign policy’.¹³

Mrs Thatcher naturally watched the dominoes come down across Eastern Europe with unrestrained delight, as first Poland and Hungary moved towards democracy without provoking Soviet intervention; then the Hungarians allowed refugees from East Germany to cross into Austria; and finally the East German authorities themselves opened the Berlin Wall on 9 November and the population emerged like the prisoners in Fidelio to tear it down with pickaxes, crowbars and their bare hands and dance exultantly on the ruins. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania followed before the end of the year as the so-called ‘velvet revolution’ brought the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel to power in Prague, while President Ceausescu and his monstrous wife were summarily executed in Bucharest on Christmas Day. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But Mrs Thatcher, mindful of the excesses of the French Revolution 200 years before, was already wary of things getting out of hand. Back in 1982 she had predicted that the Wall would fall one day:

The day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles… One day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.

But she admitted she had not expected it so soon.When it happened, she told reporters in Downing Street that she had watched the television pictures with the same enthusiasm as everyone else and celebrated ‘a great day for liberty’. But even at that moment she was quick to stamp on questions about German reunification. ‘I think you are going much too fast, much too fast,’ she warned. ‘You have to take these things step by step and handle them very wisely.’¹⁴ But she quickly found that the impetus of events was too strong for her.

She had three admissible reasons for resisting the prospect of a united Germany. First, she was afraid that its sheer economic strength would upset the balance of the European Community. Second, she was afraid that a neutral or demilitarised Germany would leave a gaping hole in NATO’s defences against a still-nuclear Soviet Union.Third, she feared that the loss of East Germany (and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact generally) might destroy Gorbachev and thus jeopardise the biggest prize of all, democracy in the USSR. All these were rational arguments for caution. But they were underpinned in Mrs Thatcher’s mind by another, inadmissible reason – her virulent and unappeased loathing of the wartime enemy.

There is no easy explanation of why Margaret Thatcher found it so much harder than others of her generation to forget the war. Certainly it dominated her adolescence from the age of fourteen to twenty – her last four years at school, her first two at university – but she was not alone in that. Grantham suffered fairly heavy German bombing – probably heavier than anywhere outside London except for Coventry and Plymouth; also from 1941 Lincolnshire was full of US airbases and US airmen, which sharpened her awareness of the Americans’ role in saving Europe from itself. She had heard first-hand testimony of the nature of the Nazi regime from the young Jewish refugee whom her parents briefly had to stay before the war; later she had a large Jewish community in her Finchley constituency. But all this pales in comparison with the experience of her male contemporaries who actually fought in France, Belgium, North Africa and Italy, let alone those who liberated the concentration camps, almost all of whom – certainly the future politicians among them – seem to have come back determined to rebuild the continent, ready to forget the war and move on. She had suffered no personal loss of family or close friends to explain her enduring bitterness. Yet forty years later she was still consumed by an ‘atavistic fear of Germany and [a] suspicion of the German people qua people’.¹⁵