great skill. Certainly they had their rows. But better than anyone else in her first Cabinet he knew how to handle the Prime Minister. For all her belief in meritocracy, Mrs Thatcher had a curious weakness for a genuine toff; and the sixth Baron Carrington was the real thing. Though a close colleague of Ted Heath who personified many of the attitudes of the Establishment she most despised, Carrington’s hereditary peerage gave him a special immunity: unlike the other Heathites in the Cabinet he posed no threat to her leadership. At the nadir of her popularity in 1981 there was actually a flurry of speculation that he might renounce his peerage to challenge her; but Carrington firmly quashed the idea.21 He was delighted to get the Foreign Office and had no greater ambition. Moreover, he was effortlessly charming, undeferential and irreverent: he made her laugh. Sometimes when she was inclined to lecture visiting foreign leaders without drawing breath, he would pass her a note saying, ‘He’s come 500 miles, let him say something.’ Once, with the Chinese leader, Chairman Hua, the situation was reversed: it was Mrs Thatcher who could not get a word in as Hua talked non-stop for fifty minutes. So Carrington passed her a note saying, ‘You are speaking too much, as usual.’ ‘Luckily,’ he recalled, ‘she had a handkerchief – she held it in front of her face and didn’t laugh too much.’22 The episode became part of Foreign Office mythology; but none of her subsequent Foreign Secretaries would have dared to tease her in this way.
Whatever her general intentions, there was one central area of foreign policy where Mrs Thatcher was always going to take the lead. She came into office determined to restore Britain’s credentials as America’s most reliable ally in the war against Soviet expansionism. That central ideological struggle was the global reflection of her mission to turn back socialism at home. Although in practice she was quickly drawn into two major foreign- policy questions in other spheres – the acrimonious quarrel over Britain’s contribution to the European Community budget and the long-running saga of Rhodesia – these were to her mind subordinate sideshows to the over- arching imperative of the Cold War. Accordingly she was keen to visit Washington as soon as possible to forge a special relationship with President Jimmy Carter.
Mrs Thatcher’s premiership overlapped so closely with the presidency of her Republican soulmate Ronald Reagan that it is easily forgotten that Reagan was not elected President until November 1980. For her first twenty months in Downing Street Mrs Thatcher had to deal with his very different Democratic predecessor. She had first met Jimmy Carter when visiting Washington in 1977 and again at the G7 summit in Tokyo in June, when Carter was not altogether impressed. ‘A tough lady’, he wrote in his diary, ‘highly opinionated, strong willed, cannot admit that she doesn’t know something.’23 After this encounter the State Department put Mrs Thatcher off until December. Before she left Carrington privately ‘doubted whether Mrs Thatcher would become great buddies with President Carter’.24 In fact, they got on better than he expected. As she later wrote, ‘it was impossible not to like Jimmy Carter’. He was a more serious man than his rather folksy manner suggested – ‘a deeply committed Christian and a man of obvious sincerity’, with a scientific background like her own. Though in retrospect she was scathing about his ‘poor handle on economics’ and what she saw as weakness in the face of Soviet expansionism, he was the leader of the free world and she was determined to get on with him.25
She arrived in Washington six weeks after the seizure of fifty American diplomats in Teheran. It was a measure of her early uncertainty that she initially intended to say nothing about the prolonged hostage crisis, feeling that to do so would be to intrude on a private American agony. Carrington and Frank Cooper (Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence) had to tell her that the Americans were interested in nothing else at that moment: she must give them unequivocal support. She agreed only reluctantly (‘Margaret, you have got to say yes. You have got to,’ Carrington urged her). But then, once persuaded, she came out with a ‘clarion call’ on the White House lawn which instantly confirmed the impact she had made on her first visit to Washington as leader in 1975:
At times like these you are entitled to look to your friends for support. We are your friends, we do support you. And we shall support you. Let there be no doubt about that.26
‘The effect was like a trumpet blast of cheer to a government and people badly in need of reassurance from their allies,’ the British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, recorded.27 The rest of her visit was a triumph. On Henderson’s advice she was carefully non-polemical in her conversations with Carter; but then, addressing Congress, she threw off all restraint and wowed her audience with a ten-minute ‘harangue’ on the virtues of the free market and the evil of Communism, followed by questions which she handled with an informality and relish the like of which Washington had never seen before from a visiting leader. More than one Congressman invited her to accept the Republican nomination for President. She went on the next day to address an audience of 2,000 at the Foreign Policy Association in New York, where the directness of her message again made a tremendous hit. The Russians, she boasted, had called her the Iron Lady: ‘They’re quite right – I am.’28 In that moment – a year before Reagan entered the White House – MargaretThatcher became a heroine to the American right.
Ten days later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In her memoirs LadyThatcher described this action as ‘one of those genuine watersheds which are so often predicted, which so rarely occur’. She immediately saw the invasion as bearing out her warnings of worldwide Soviet expansionism, part of a pattern with Cuban and East German intervention in Angola and Namibia, all taking advantage of the West’s gullible belief in
More seriously she discovered that her call for a resolute response to the Soviet action was not supported by the rest of Europe. The invasion of Afghanistan sharply highlighted the gulf between American and European perceptions of the Cold War. The Europeans, particularly the Germans, had always gained more tangible benefits from
‘The Bloody British Question’
If Mrs Thatcher could not bring her European partners with her on Afghanistan, this was partly because she had already antagonised them over Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. This was a matter she could not possibly leave to the Foreign Office, combining as it did her two favourite themes of patriotism and good housekeeping. It was exactly the sort of issue on which she thought the Foreign Office liable to give up vital British interests for the sake of being good Europeans. It offered a wonderful early opportunity to be seen battling for Britain on the international stage, cheered on by the tabloid press, on a simple issue that every voter could understand. At a time when the economy was already proving intractable, Europe offered a much more popular cause in which to display her determination not to compromise, and she seized it with relish. It took five years before she finally achieved a satisfactory settlement. The long battle helped set the style of her premiership. It also got her relationship with the European Community off to a bad start from which it never recovered.
There is no dispute that there was a genuine problem, left over from the original terms of Britain’s entry to the Community negotiated by Ted Heath in 1971 and not resolved by Callaghan’s essentially cosmetic renegotiation
