The Iron Lady

to the aggressor’. ³¹ In April 1993, following the first massacre at Srebrenica – the second, even worse one, was in July 1995 – she rejected Hurd’s plea that lifting the arms embargo would merely create ‘a level killing field’, as ‘a terrible and disgraceful phrase’. Bosnia was ‘already a killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again’. The horrors being perpetrated were ‘not worthy of Europe, not worthy of the West and not worthy of the United States… It is in Europe’s sphere of influence. It should be in Europe’s sphere of conscience… We are little more than accomplices to a massacre.’³² Privately she was said to have told Hurd: ‘Douglas, Douglas, you would make Neville Chamberlain look like a warmonger.’³³

In retrospect she was probably right. One can respect the reluctance of Major, Hurd and initially Bill Clinton (who succeeded George Bush as US President in 1993) to escalate the war by taking sides. Their instinct all along was to try to secure a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement via a succession of intermediaries: they could not believe that the Serbs could be so ruthless and unreasonable. But the fact was that the deployment of American force was in the end the only thing that brought the Serbs to conclude the Dayton Agreement in 1995. As so often, Lady Thatcher’s bleak view of human nature and the necessity of military strength to defeat aggressors was more realistic than the pragmatism of those who thought themselves the ‘realists’. The slaughter could have been stopped earlier if Europe had found the will to act firmly in its own back yard. It was ironic that she who so opposed Europe’s ambition to develop a single foreign policy should have been the one calling for it to act unitedly in Bosnia. Sadly, events justified her scepticism and vindicated her view that no trouble anywhere in the world would ever be tackled without American leadership.

It was relatively easy for the Government to dismiss the former Prime Minister’s lectures about Bosnia. She caused them more serious difficulty nearer home in the autumn of 1992 when the Maastricht Treaty finally came before Parliament. The Government suffered the worst possible curtain raiser to this debate on 16 September – ‘Black Wednesday’ – when Norman Lamont was humiliatingly forced to abandon Britain’s membership of the ERM. After all the wrangles with Lawson and Howe about joining, culminating in Mrs Thatcher’s reluctant acquiescence in October 1990, sterling crashed out of the system after just two years, at the cost of some ?15 billion of the country’s gold reserves and dealing a blow to the Government’s reputation for financial competence from which it never recovered. Securing Mrs Thatcher’s agreement to Britain’s belated entry had been Major’s personal triumph as Chancellor: now premature exit wrecked his premiership. Lady Thatcher – in Washington at the time – could not help but be delighted. ‘If you try to buck the market, the market will buck you.’³⁴ She could not gloat too openly in public, but nothing would stop her trumpeting her vindication in private. Lamont told Wyatt that she was ‘ringing all her friends saying, “Isn’t it marvellous, I told you so etc.”’³⁵ She warned against any thought of rejoining the ERM, but urged the Government to capitalise on its escape by cutting interest rates to beat the recession.

Back at Westminster on 4 November the Government faced two crucial Commons divisions on a so-called ‘paving’ vote, called by Major to reassure his European partners before the committee stage of the Maastricht Bill. With an overall Tory majority of just twenty-one, and two or three dozen Europhobes threatening to vote against the Government, Major’s survival was on the line. The whips pulled out all the stops; but Lady Thatcher summoned wavering backbenchers to her room to tell them firmly what she expected of them.At the last moment Major personally cajoled leading Eurosceptics into the Government lobby with a promise that the Government would not finally ratify the treaty until after a second Danish referendum. By such means the Government won the first division by six votes, the second by three. Thus Major survived by the skin of his teeth. But he could not forget that at this crisis of his premiership his predecessor had done her best to destroy him.

For most of the first half of 1993 Lady Thatcher concentrated on her memoirs, while the Maastricht Bill ground through the Commons, suffering just two minor defeats in committee. But when it went up to the Lords in June she re-emerged to lead the attack in the Upper House, denying that the treaty followed naturally from the Single European Act which she had signed – ‘I could never have signed this treaty’ – and demanding a referendum before it was ratified.³⁶ With Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and John Wakeham speaking for the Government, the treaty was overwhelmingly approved. But the schism that its passage caused in the Tory party has never fully healed.

The Mummy’s curse

There was just one issue on which Lady Thatcher steadily supported the Government. Between 1992 and 1997 she probably devoted more time to Hong Kong than to any other subject. Maastricht and Bosnia made the headlines, but Hong Kong was the issue on which she felt she still had a responsibility and could exert an influence. The Chinese leadership still treated her with enormous respect and she handled them – particularly the charmless Prime Minister Li Peng – with a skilful mixture of outspokenness and tact. There was a particularly sharp diplomatic crisis in March 1995 when the Chinese were making difficulties about a number of thorny issues concerning the handover: among other things, they had got it into their heads that the British were planning to remove Hong Kong’s entire gold reserves with them when they left. Lady Thatcher flew out, with the approval of Major, and broke the logjam by announcing sweetly but decisively in the hearing of journalists at the red-carpet ceremony at the airport exactly what she had come to get straight. No more was heard about the gold reserves or any of the other stumbling blocks.³⁷ In public and in private she boldly proclaimed her confidence that economic development in China would inevitably bring political freedom in its wake; and she protested firmly about Beijing’s treatment of dissidents. In 1994 she announced that she had already booked rooms in Hong Kong so as to be present in person for the handover; and indeed when the day came, on 1 July 1997, she was there – with Tony Blair and Prince Charles – to witness the interminable ceremony in pouring rain. So far, she acknowledged in 2002, the Chinese had ‘generally honoured their commitments’.³⁸

Lady Thatcher did a good deal of unofficial lobbying on behalf of British firms bidding for contracts around the world. She intervened, for example, to stop Kuwait backing down on an agreement to buy armoured cars from GKN, by ringing the Crown Prince and telling him firmly that he should stick to his word; another time she flew secretly from Hong Kong to Azerbaijan to help BP secure a major oil contract under the noses of the French and American ambassadors.³⁹ As Prime Minister she had always believed in ‘batting for Britain’ – particularly in the arms trade – by face-to-face diplomacy with her opposite numbers, and after leaving office she did not cease to exert her personal influence wherever it could still be effective. Though it could never compensate for the loss of real power, this more than anything else did make her feel that she was still serving her country.

The first volume of her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, was published in October 1993. Although the real scores she had to settle were with those of her former colleagues who had ganged up on her, let her down or ultimately betrayed her, the media were sure to focus on what she had to say about her successor. Rumours abounded even before the Daily Mirror leaked her dismissive view that Major, as Chancellor in 1990, had ‘swallowed… the slogans of the European lobby’ and ‘intellectually… was drifting with the tide’.⁴⁰ This was the start of an intensive blitz of book promotion accompanied by a four-part BBC television series.

Both the book and the series showed that the Iron Lady had lost none of her passionate intensity. The book has its longueurs, but it is still by far the most comprehensive and readable of modern prime ministerial memoirs: partisan, of course, but generally a clear and vivid account of her side of the arguments. Of course it aggrandises her role, exaggerates the degree to which she knew where she was going from the beginning, slides over her moments of doubt and hesitation and diminishes the contribution of most of her colleagues, aides and advisers. It is a shockingly ungenerous book. Nevertheless, it sold well. Lady Thatcher spent two weeks signing copies in bookshops all around Britain, then flew off in November to do the same in America and Japan.The paperback edition appeared in Britain in March 1995 and did even better. Meanwhile, her contract with HarperCollins obliged her to lose no time in getting on with the second volume covering her early years.

This, though autobiographically more interesting, had less commercial potential. Lady Thatcher was therefore persuaded to supplement the 450-odd pages describing her childhood and rise to power with another 150 pages giving her view of current events in the four and a half years since her fall. If The Downing Street Years had been unhelpful to her successor, The Path to Power, which appeared in May 1995 accompanied by another media circus, was much worse. This time she avoided