The Iron Lady

conflict escalated. As the Serbs sought to maintain by force their domination of the former federation, she boldly championed the right of the constituent republics – first Croatia and Slovenia, later Bosnia-Hercegovina – to break away. She saw the issue partly as one of nationalist self-determination, with echoes of her resistance to the federal pretensions of Brussels; but also as the latest front in the continuing battle of democracy against Communism.

Major and Hurd, however, were determined to avoid either Britain or NATO getting sucked into a Balkan civil war and asserted a policy of non-intervention, with an embargo on the supply of arms to all sides, to which they stubbornly adhered in the face of mounting evidence of Serb atrocities. For the next few years Mrs Thatcher’s militant anti-Communism was unusually allied with the humanitarian conscience of the world in demanding action against the Serbs, beating in vain against the cautious pragmatism of the British Government, which took the lead in blocking direct NATO, EU or UN intervention.

But the issue on which Mrs Thatcher set herself most uncompromisingly against her successor was, inevitably, Europe. From the time of her Bruges speech her attitude towards the Community had been hardening, but so long as she was in office her growing antipathy was restrained by the need to negotiate the best deal for Britain that she could achieve. From the moment she left office that restraint was off. Now she was free to follow her instinct, to criticise the deals which Major and Hurd secured, and she did so without inhibition or consideration of the pressures that would have weighed with her if she had still been in government. On the contrary, she felt no compunction about putting herself at the head of the hitherto quite small section of the Tory party which was bitterly opposed to any further European integration, thereby helping to tip the party’s centre of gravity over the next seven years from a broadly pro-European to a strongly Eurosceptic, even Europhobic, stance. By leading the opposition on this issue she not only thwarted Major’s vague ambition to put Britain ‘at the heart of Europe’, but also undermined his authority more generally, fuelling a civil war in the party which not only destroyed his government in the short term, but wrecked the credibility of the Tories as a governing party for years to come. This was her revenge for November 1990.

So long as she remained in the Commons it was plain that Mrs Thatcher would dominate the House whenever she chose to speak. It therefore came as a huge relief to Major when she announced that she would stand down at the next election. She had been in two minds whether to stay in the Commons or go to the Lords. Though no great parliamentarian, she was clear that she must retain a platform in one or other House. Some of her supporters urged her to stay in the Commons, mainly to keep the Government up to the mark, but also to keep open the possibility of a comeback in the event of some future crisis. At the end of March she was still wavering. Finally she decided that she would be freer to speak her mind if she made it clear that she had ruled out the possibility of a comeback.

For all her disillusion with Major, she did want the Tories to win the coming election. On 12 December outward cordiality was restored when the Majors and most of the Cabinet attended the Thatchers’ fortieth wedding-anniversary celebration at Claridge’s. During the early months of 1992 she concentrated on her memoirs, paying just two visits to the United States where she managed to say nothing controversial.

Major called the election for 9 April. In appreciation of her restraint and doubtless in the hope that she would keep it up till polling day, he sent Mrs Thatcher a bunch of twenty-four pink roses. She was unimpressed. ‘A bunch of flowers won’t make up for a ?28 billion deficit, Woodrow,’ she complained.¹⁶ But for the moment she bit her lip, so much so that Andrew Turnbull (now serving Major) told Wyatt on 17 March that ‘her behaviour has been absolutely first-class… We couldn’t have asked for more. She’s been wonderful.’¹⁷

She played a fairly discreet part in the campaign, appearing just once with Major at a rally for Tory candidates where she raised morale with a strong endorsement of his leadership, and doing walkabouts in selected marginal seats. In his memoirs Major alleged that ‘allies of my predecessor’ did their best to undermine his campaign;¹⁸ but Mrs Thatcher herself was in America for the last week, returning only on the evening of polling day in time to attend a round of election-night parties. She watched the results with Wyatt in a small room at the top of Alistair McAlpine’s house in a mood of mellow magnanimity. She emerged to tell the press: ‘It is a great night. It is the end of Socialism.’¹⁹ The next day she hailed Major’s ‘famous victory’ and urged him now to press ‘full steam ahead’.²⁰

Yet within days she published a devastating interview in the American magazine Newsweek which expressed her real feelings. Under the headline ‘Do Not Undo My Work’ she poured scorn on her successor’s ability to fill her shoes:

I don’t accept the idea that all of a sudden Major is his own man. He has been Prime Minister for 17 months and he inherited all these great achievements of the past eleven and a half years which have fundamentally changed Britain.

Major, she insisted, was entitled to chart his own course only within the limits that she had set out.²¹ This was a breathtakingly arrogant put-down of the elected Prime Minister on the morrow of his ‘famous victory’. But she was unrepentant. ‘I only said I would keep quiet during the election,’ she told Wyatt.²² She was determined not to be silenced.

There had been some speculation about what type of peerage she would take. Prime Ministers are traditionally entitled to an earldom, so there was a possibility that she might become a countess. Having resurrected hereditary titles for others, it would have been consistent to take one herself. Rather quaintly, however, she felt that she and Denis lacked the means to support a hereditary title.²³ Mark already had Denis’s baronetcy to look forward to; so in the end she concluded: ‘I thought it was enough to be a life peer.’²⁴ On 6 June she was gazetted as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire. Cynics noted that she had never cared for Grantham; Kesteven sounded so much more distinguished.

She took her seat in the Upper House on 30 June – ‘like a lioness entering into what she must realise is something of a cage’²⁵ – just in time to speak in a debate on the Maastricht Treaty on 3 July.‘Your maiden speech is supposed to be non-controversial,’Wyatt reminded her. ‘But I shall only be following precedent,’ she protested. ‘Macmillan in his maiden speech attacked me.’²⁶ In fact, she made a fairly gracious and even witty speech, written for her by Charles Powell, dissenting from the Government’s support for Maastricht but expressing confidence in Major’s ability to use Britain’s forthcoming chairmanship of the Council of Ministers to influence the development of the Community in the right direction.

Her restraint was short-lived. She was working on her memoirs in Switzerland in August when the Vice- President of Bosnia came to beg her to make a fresh appeal on behalf of his country. She responded with a flurry of articles and TV interviews on both sides of the Atlantic, calling for military action to halt the continuing Serb assault on Gorazde and Sarajevo, end the brutal policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and save the Bosnian state.What was happening in Bosnia, she declared, was ‘reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Nazis’.²⁷ Despairing of the ‘paralysis’ of the EU, she called on the Americans to take a lead. NATO, she wrote in the New York Times, was ‘the most practical instrument to hand’. The Balkans were not ‘out of area’, but part of Europe.²⁸ In reply to those who argued that Western intervention would only exacerbate the conflict, she insisted that she was not calling for a full-scale military invasion, just the bombing of Serbian supply routes and the lifting of the arms embargo which prevented the Bosnians buying the means to defend themselves.²⁹ But her call fell on deaf ears. With a few exceptions, most MPs of both parties, most of the Establishment, elder statesmen like Ted Heath and most commentators backed the Foreign Office line that Britain had no interest in getting drawn into the conflict: many, frankly, took the view that the best outcome to be hoped for was a quick Serb victory. The most that Major and Hurd would do was to contribute British troops to a UN force protecting convoys of humanitarian aid; but this only strengthened the argument against military intervention, since these troops would have become vulnerable to retaliation if NATO had bombed the Serbs. Douglas Hurd still believes that active Western intervention would only have increased the bloodshed and made a bad situation worse.³⁰

Nevertheless, Lady Thatcher kept up her demand, with mounting contempt for the Government’s inertia, for the next three years, until eventually the Americans stepped in with enough force to bring the Serbs to the negotiating table. In December 1992 she warned of a ‘holocaust’ in Bosnia and insisted: ‘We could have stopped this. We could still do so.’ By treating the conflict as a purely internal matter, the West had ‘actually given comfort