to the General Election. In April she sent the former Colonial Secretary Lord Boyd to observe the Rhodesian elections for the Tory party. Bishop Muzorewa won and duly became the country’s first black Prime Minister at the head of a power-sharing government. But with Nkomo and Mugabe (now allied as the Patriotic Front) boycotting the elections, most international opinion declared them meaningless. Boyd, however, declared them fair and valid, and Mrs Thatcher accepted his report. In her first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister she warmly welcomed the elections as marking a ‘major change’ and promised to build on them.68 Six weeks later, stopping off in Canberra on her way back from the Tokyo summit at the end of June, she again hinted that Britain would recognise Muzorewa, provoking a storm of protest led by the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who warned her that she was isolating herself from the rest of the Commonwealth, and indeed the world. President Carter had already rejected the result of the elections and announced – in defiance of Congress, which voted to lift them – that American sanctions against Rhodesia would be maintained.
On her return to Britain, Carrington persuaded her to change her mind. Recognition of Muzorewa, he argued, would not only split both the Commonwealth and the Atlantic alliance, boost Soviet influence in Africa and damage Britain economically; it was also futile, since the internal settlement would not end the war in Rhodesia, but only widen it, with the Soviet Union backing Nkomo and China backing Mugabe. Britain would be left holding nominal responsibility before the United Nations for an escalating conflict. As Lady Thatcher subsequently wrote in her memoirs: ‘Unpleasant realities had to be faced… He turned out to be right.’69
She also found other grounds to change her mind. She was persuaded that there were legal flaws in Smith’s gerrymandered constitution, which was unlike any other that Britain had bequeathed her former colonies. Strict regard for legality was something Mrs Thatcher always took very seriously. In addition, following the failure of the Vance – Owen initiative, she liked the idea of Britain going it alone to achieve a settlement without American help. ‘How do we decolonise a colony when there is no problem at all?’ she asked her advisers. ‘We get all the parties round a table at Lancaster House,’ they replied. ‘They work out a constitution that suits them all; then they have an election on that constitution and that’s goodbye.’ Very well, she concluded, ‘Let’s go down that road and see what happens.’70
For all these reasons – though not without a last-minute wobble when she appeared to go cold on the whole idea – Mrs Thatcher had made up her mind before she flew to Lusaka for the Commonwealth Conference in August that the only solution lay in a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties. She actually signalled her shift of view in the House of Commons on 25 July, when the Foreign Office succeeded in writing into her speech a carefully phrased statement that any settlement must be internationally recognised. But scarcely anyone noticed the significance of her words: it is not certain that she fully recognised it herself.71 Carrington insists that she had determined what she wanted to achieve before she went to Lusaka. But it was still generally assumed that she would be walking into a lions’ den, setting herself against the united view of the rest of the Commonwealth. She was certainly prepared for a hostile reception.
Though Denis had travelled extensively in Africa, Mrs Thatcher had no connection with either the old or the new Commonwealth; nor – unlike Callaghan orWilson – did she feel any political sympathy with Africa’s liberation struggle. On the contrary, like Ted Heath, she found the hypocrisy of the African leaders preaching democracy for others while operating one-party states themselves, reviling Britain one moment while demanding increased aid the next, very hard to swallow.Yet she did not want to see the club break up; and in practice, once exposed to them privately in the relaxed atmosphere of a Commonwealth Conference, she discovered most of the African leaders to be much more agreeable and a good deal less ‘Marxist’ than she had expected.72 In particular, as Carrington noted, she ‘blossomed in the warmth of Kenneth Kaunda’s friendly personality’. 73 At Lusaka she even scored a memorable diplomatic coup by dancing with him: since her Oxford days she had been an excellent dancer, and the resulting photographs did more than any diplomatic communique to dissolve tensions.
Much of the credit for the success of Lusaka has been given to the Queen for helping to create the family atmosphere in which Mrs Thatcher and President Kaunda were able to overcome their mutual suspicion.74 But at least as much is due to Mrs Thatcher herself, first for allowing Carrington to change her mind on the central issue and then, having changed it, for her determination to hammer out – with Malcolm Fraser, Michael Manley (of Jamaica) and the Commonwealth Secretary-General Sonny Ramphal – the lines of an agreement which could bring Mugabe and Nkomo to Lancaster House. Carrington paid tribute to the skill with which she exploited the element of surprise at her unexpected reversal. Always concerned to get the legal framework right, she insisted that Rhodesia must first return to its constitutional status as a colony, with the appointment of a new Governor and all the flummery of British rule. In return she agreed that Britain would send troops to enforce and monitor the ceasefire. This was a risk which Callaghan had not been prepared to take. But Mrs Thatcher accepted that Britain had a responsibility to discharge; she was determined not to have the United Nations involved.75 More than anything else it was this guarantee of British military commitment which persuaded the Patriotic Front to lay down its arms. By the concerted pressure of South Africa, the neighbouring ‘Front Line’ states, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States, all parties to the conflict were cajoled into agreeing to attend peace talks in London in September.
Carrington still had no great hopes of a settlement. But for fifteen weeks he put the whole weight of the Foreign Office into the effort to achieve one, believing that his tenure would not last long if he failed.76 Having played her part at Lusaka, Mrs Thatcher left her Foreign Secretary to chair the talks with minimum interference.While Kaunda flew to London to impress on Nkomo that he must settle, and Samora Machel of Mozambique similarly leaned on Mugabe, Mrs Thatcher’s role behind the scenes was to make plain to the whites that they could not look to Britain to bail them out. The negotiations were tense and protracted – a walkout by one or other party was never far away; but an agreement was eventually signed just before Christmas, providing for elections in the New Year, a ten-year embargo on the transfer of land and British help in forging a united army out of the previously warring forces. Christopher Soames was appointed Governor to oversee the elections and bring the new state of Zimbabwe to independence.
Mrs Thatcher would frankly have preferred that the Marxist Mugabe had not won the elections. Right up to the last moment, diehard whites still hoped that she would declare the result invalid. But she refused to do so, and firmly quashed any thought that she might recognise a military coup. She was their last hope, and when she spelled out the reality they knew the game was up. Mugabe’s victory was in fact the best possible outcome, since winning power through the ballot box served – at least in the short term – to de-radicalise the Patriotic Front. Once in power, Mugabe quickly declared Zimbabwe a one-party state; but for the best part of twenty years it seemed a relatively successful one. Only at the end of the century did the issue of the unequal ownership of land – shelved at Lancaster House – erupt in Government-sponsored violence against white farmers as the ageing dictator clung to office, wrecking the country’s once-prosperous economy and throwing its multiracial future into doubt.77
The contrary pulls of patriotic sentiment and geopolitical realism recurred in relation to other remnants of Britain’s imperial past: the Falklands, Grenada and Hong Kong. In the case of Rhodesia, as in Hong Kong, realism prevailed. For fourteen years since 1965 the colony had been a running sore in British politics, the annual vote on the maintenance of sanctions a source of division and embarrassment to the Tory party in particular. All Mrs Thatcher wanted in 1979 was to be honourably rid of it. She was lucky that the circumstances came together to make a solution possible just as she came into office. But she deserves credit for seizing the opportunity, against her initial instinct, and for exerting her influence to secure a tolerable settlement. The outcome gained her a good deal of international credit, not only with black Africa but also in Washington, at a time when the Government’s domestic economic record was already looking bleak. After seven difficult months, the Zimbabwe settlement was her Government’s first unquestionable success.
The end of the beginning
By the time the Zimbabwe settlement was signed at the end of 1979 the Government’s honeymoon, such as it was, was over.The Lancaster House agreement was the one bright spot in an otherwise darkening picture.The novelty of a woman Prime Minister had quickly worn off. Her style was established: brisk, didactic, combative, with a touch of syrup. There was no lingering doubt about her capacity to do the job. She had established her
