Once again, however, Mrs Thatcher had to swallow her objections and accept ‘a compromise text close to the original draft’. Flexible response was modified and the Alliance declared that it was ‘moving away’ from forward defence. At her insistence the words ‘weapons of last resort’ were stiffened with an assertion that there were ‘no circumstances in which nuclear retaliation in response to military action might be discounted’. Mrs Thatcher was still not happy with ‘this unwieldy compromise’.32 But she had no veto in NATO as she had in Europe, so she had to accept it. ‘It was a landmark shift,’ Bush wrote. ‘It offered the Soviets firm evidence of the West’s genuine desire to change NATO. Our offer was on the table.’33
The final act of the Cold War was also, suitably enough, the final act of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. In November 1990, as the votes were being cast in London which forced her resignation, she was in Paris attending a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), at which she committed Britain to substantial cuts in the stationing of conventional forces in Germany. In reality it was a largely ceremonial occasion, with congratulatory speeches celebrating the victory of freedom over tyranny and resolution over coexistence. But it was the triumph of everything Mrs Thatcher had been fighting for all her political life.
The environment and global warming
A major new issue appeared on the political agenda in the late 1980s – and Margaret Thatcher, with all her other domestic and international concerns, deserves much of the credit for putting it there. Since the 1970s ‘the environment’ had been the fashionable term for a ragbag of relatively minor problems to do with planning and land use. Around 1988, however, environmental concerns suddenly acquired a new dimension with the discovery of global warming, caused – probably – by the build-up in the earth’s atmosphere of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’: carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. From parochial questions of road building and waste disposal which were normally beneath a Prime Minister’s notice, the environment assumed, almost overnight, the status of an international challenge which transcended even the Cold War.
In the early years of her premiership Mrs Thatcher had not taken environmental concerns very seriously. As a combative Tory politician she saw environmental campaigners, particularly Greenpeace, as just another branch of CND, a mix of sincere but naive sentimentalists. She insisted that socialism, inherently inefficient and unaccountable, was the great polluter, whereas free enterprise was both more efficient and better able to spend resources on environmental protection. Indeed, she suggested in 1988, cleaning up pollution was ‘almost a function of prosperity, because it is the East European block, their chemical factories, that have been pouring stuff into the Rhine’.34
She also believed that coal and other fossil fuels beloved of the left were intrinsically dirty, whereas nuclear energy was clean and safe. Those who campaigned against nuclear power on environmental grounds were simply wrong, like those who imagined they were promoting peace by opposing nuclear weapons. She saw it as her business to cut through this sort of emotive nonsense to deal with the facts. Proud of her credentials as a scientist in a world of arts-educated generalists, she believed that she understood the scientific arguments. She believed that scientific problems would be solved by the further development of science, not by regulation.
One project she had always backed, even before the Falklands gave her a special interest in the region – was the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). It therefore gave her great patriotic satisfaction that it was the scientists of the BAS who in 1985 discovered a large hole in the earth’s ozone layer, nearly as large as the United States and growing. International efforts had already been under way for some time to limit the emission of halogen gases, principally chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays: a UN-sponsored conference in Montreal in 1987 set a target of halving the use of CFCs in ten years. But the fact that the hole in the ozone layer was a British discovery undoubtedly helped persuade Mrs Thatcher to throw her weight into efforts to remedy it. She was also greatly influenced by Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1987 to 1990, Sir Crispin Tickell, a career diplomat who happened to be a serious amateur meteorologist. It was Tickell who brought the urgency of the problem to Mrs Thatcher’s attention and persuaded her to make it the subject of a major speech, which he then helped her to write.
A decade later her speech to the Royal Society in September 1988 was remembered as ‘a true epiphany, the blinding discovery of a conviction politician, which overnight turned the environment from being a minority to a mainstream concern in Britain’.35 At the time it made rather less impact. Most of it was a standard affirmation of the Government’s commitment to science; only towards the end did she turn to the three recently observed phenomena of greenhouse gases, the hole in the ozone layer, and acid rain. She stressed the need for more research, as well as immediate steps to cut emissions, and emphasised how much money the Government was already spending on cleaning Britain’s rivers.36
In March 1989 Mrs Thatcher chaired a three-day conference in London on Saving the Ozone Layer, attended by 123 nations, which strengthened the Montreal protocol by setting a new target of ending CFC emissions entirely by the end of the century: she spoke at both the beginning and the end. Within Whitehall and the EC she chased progress vigorously on the tightening of anti-pollution regulations, backing the DoE against the Treasury and other departments which raised the sort of objections on grounds of cost that she herself used to make a few years earlier.37 In August she told President Bush of ‘her intention to overhaul Britain’s environmental legislation’ – clearly trying to encourage him to do the same;38 and in November she made a major speech to the UN General Assembly in which she announced the establishment of a new climate research centre in Britain and called for ‘a vast international co-operative effort’ to save the global environment.39
All this was before the final report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in June 1990. This – the unanimous conclusion of 300 international scientists – warned that if no action were taken to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, average global temperatures would rise by anything between 1.4 and 2.8 per cent by 2030, causing sea levels to rise with disastrous consequences for low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Holland and East Anglia. (Mrs Thatcher was particularly fond of pointing out that one Commonwealth country, the Maldive Islands, with a population of 177,000, would disappear entirely.)40 This was the first authoritative international confirmation that global warming was really happening, though the evidence was already visible in severe drought leading to famine in Sudan, Ethiopia and much of central Africa. But Mrs Thatcher, encouraged by Crispin Tickell, had already anticipated its recommendations. Opening the promised new research centre – the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – near Bracknell in Berkshire in May 1990, she committed Britain to stabilising carbon dioxide emissions by 2005, which actually meant a 30 per cent cut over fifteen years, back to the 1990 figure. ‘This,’ she told George Bush pointedly, ‘is a demanding target.’41
But the Americans dragged their feet. At the London conference the previous year they had combined with the Soviet Union and Japan to reject an earlier target date for the elimination of CFCs. Now Bush told a conference in Washington that more research was needed before action on carbon dioxide would be justified. Mrs Thatcher pressed him to take the matter seriously.
Her words fell on deaf ears.At the second World Climate Conference in Geneva in November, 137 countries agreed that global warming was a reality and pledged themselves to take action. But while the EC, Japan and Australia advocated freezing CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000, the Americans, this time supported by the USSR and Saudi Arabia, opposed the setting of firm targets. In her speech at the conference – one of her last appearances on the world stage before her fall – Mrs Thatcher tactfully made no direct criticism of American or Russian reluctance. But for once she had to admit that Europe was showing the way. ‘I hope that Europe’s example will help the task of securing worldwide agreement.’42
In Tickell’s view the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, at which 170 countries including the Americans finally agreed to cut CO2 emissions by 2000, would never have happened without her effort. Five years later the 1997 Kyoto Agreement set a new target of cutting emissions back to the 1990 level by 2010 – only for the US, now led by Bush’s resolutely isolationist and oil-oriented son, to refuse to ratify it.
But by then Lady Thatcher had changed her mind. As part of her increasingly slavish subservience to American leadership in the late 1990s, she concluded in her last book,
