after the election Roy Jenkins was disconcerted to find her ‘thinking always a little too much in terms of the EEC and NATO as two bodies which ought to be amalgamated’.50 Nine months later she was happy to agree with a friendly questioner in the Commons that ‘Europe needs to be united, and to stay united as a free Europe against the unfree part of Europe which is bound by bonds of steel around the Soviet Union’.51 The Cold War set the framework of her thinking.
On this basis she started out moderately pro-European. In her speech to the Tory Party Conference just before Dublin she promised to fight Britain’s corner as a committed member of the Community, asserting that it was ‘no good joining anything half-heartedly’.52 She was happy to acknowledge that there were lessons Britain could profitably learn from Europe: ‘If we want a German and French standard of living we must have a German and French standard of work.’53 Or again: ‘There are many Continental practices that one would like to assume in this country, including the Continentals’ tendency not to spend money that they have not got.’54 But the budget dispute quickly brought out her instinctive underlying hostility to Europe and an unpleasant streak of contempt for the Europeans. ‘They are all a rotten lot,’ she told Roy Jenkins just before Dublin, couching her scorn as usual in terms of defence. ‘Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only ones who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.’55 Her belief in the essential superiority of the British was founded on two ideas. First, her memory of the war, when most of continental Europe had been overrun and occupied and had to be liberated by Britain (and the Americans). ‘We,’ she once exclaimed, ‘who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free when otherwise it would have been in chains…’56 The idea that the Europeans were not permanently grateful to Britain – as she was to the Americans – never ceased to offend her. Second, she contrived to believe that the sense of justice was an essentially British (or, more specifically, English) characteristic which foreigners did not understand. ‘There’s not a strand of equity or fairness in Europe,’ she declared in her television memoirs. ‘They’re out to get as much as they can, that’s one of those enormous differences.’57
The next European Council met in Luxembourg in April 1980. This time Britain was offered a rebate of ?700 million a year, roughly two-thirds of the disputed loaf, which Jenkins regarded as ‘a very favourable offer’. ‘To almost universal amazement’, however, Mrs Thatcher again rejected it.58 She was ‘much quieter, less strident, less abrasive than at Dublin’, but still adamant. When Jenkins told her she was making a great mistake, ‘she good-humouredly but firmly said “Don’t try persuading me, you know I find persuasion very counterproductive.”’59 The French Commissioner, Claude Cheysson, sensed that Mrs Thatcher positively relished her isolation. ‘Not only didn’t she mind about it,’ he recalled, ‘but she was pleased with that. She was very anxious that Britain would be Britain, and Britain needed no ally. Britain could stand on its own.’60 Long before the Falklands she was already striking Churchillian poses.
Faced with another impasse at heads of government level, the Commission now dressed up ‘approximately the same deal in somewhat different form’ – still only a two-thirds refund but extended for the next three years – to present to the council of foreign ministers the next month in Brussels. On their own responsibility Carrington and Gilmour accepted this, and thought they had done well. Carrington, in Jenkins’ view, ‘showed himself a more skilful and sensible negotiator than his head of government. He knew when to settle. She did not.’61 The Foreign Secretary and his deputy then flew back to Britain and drove straight to Chequers, feeling pleased with themselves. But if they expected congratulation they were swiftly disillusioned. ‘My immediate reaction,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘was far from favourable.’62 ‘Had we been bailiffs arriving to take possession of the furniture,’ Gilmour wrote, ‘we would probably have been more cordially received. The Prime Minister was like a firework whose fuse had already been lit; we could almost hear the sizzling.’ Without even offering them the drink they were dying for, she bombarded them with ‘an interminable barrage of irrelevance’, accusing them of selling the country down the river, vowing to resign rather than accept it.63 Eventually they escaped back to London, where Gilmour ignored the Prime Minister’s reaction and briefed journalists that they had secured a diplomatic triumph. The next day’s papers duly hailed a great victory for her tough tactics. Temporarily outmanoeuvred, Mrs Thatcher was forced to swallow her objections and accept the deal, consoling herself that if not the end of the matter, it represented ‘huge progress from the position the Government had inherited’.64
‘Her objection,’ Gilmour believed, ‘was to the fact of the agreement, not its terms. That was not because we had succeeded where she had failed. It was because, to her, the grievance was more valuable than its solution.’65 There is no doubt that the dispute was a godsend to her in her first year, providing what she always needed, an external enemy against whom to vent her aggression and prove her mettle. Greedy foreigners trying to get their hands on Britain’s money offered the perfect outlet for patriotic indignation, a priceless distraction as inflation continued to rise and unemployment began to mount alarmingly. The EC budget battle set the style of her premiership and fixed the tabloid image of battling Maggie swinging her handbag and standing up for Britain against the wiles of Brussels. For the moment she was obliged to make the best of the interim settlement Carrington had secured, while still holding out for a permanent solution, which was not finally achieved until the Fontainebleau council of June 1984. Until then the ‘Bloody British Question’, as it was known in Brussels, continued to paralyse all other progress in the Community and poison Britain’s relationship with Europe.
She won in the end when two new leaders, Francois Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany, realised that they would get no peace till Mrs Thatcher got what she demanded. But her victory was achieved at a considerable cost. First, however much she claimed to be a full and equal member, her exclusive preoccupation with the budget prevented Britain playing a full role in the development of the Community, thus confirming the dismal pattern of critical semi-detachment already set by Labour. Second, Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic rhetoric, gleefully amplified by the
In this way she began to undermine the Tory commitment to Europe which she had inherited from Macmillan and Heath, leading within ten years to a deep split in the party which would eventually destroy her and bedevil the life of her successors.As Roy Jenkins wrote, ‘It was a heavy price to pay for 400 million ecus.’67
Rhodesia into Zimbabwe
The long-running problem of ending colonial rule in Rhodesia, by contrast, was a subject on which Mrs Thatcher, very soon after taking office, dramatically changed her mind and modified her initial instinct, leading to a settlement which reflected her flexibility and pragmatism. Unlike Europe or the Cold War, Rhodesia was not an issue with which she felt any visceral involvement. Her sympathies were instinctively with the white settlers – ‘our kith and kin’, as the British press liked to call them. Denis had business connections with Rhodesia, and she could not forget that Ian Smith, the rebel Prime Minister, had served in the RAF during the war. The African leaders, by contrast, she regarded as Communist-sponsored terrorists. Nevertheless Rhodesia was marginal to her central concerns, a tiresome responsibility which she simply wanted to dispose of honourably.
Ten years after Smith’s illegal declaration of independence from Britain, it was the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Angola and Mozambique in 1975 which spelled the end of the line for rebel Rhodesia. As the two rival African guerrilla groups, ZIPRA and ZANU, led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, stepped up their military incursions from neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, South Africa decided it could no longer go on shoring up its northern satellite and began to put pressure on Smith to bow to the inevitable and accept majority rule. In 1977 Smith rejected an Anglo-American peace plan put forward by David Owen and the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and negotiated his own internal settlement – heavily favourable to the whites – with the more accommodating Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Callaghan and Owen – and Carter – immediately declared it unacceptable and refused to recognise it.
Mrs Thatcher’s instinct was to support the Smith/Muzorewa settlement, and this remained her position up
