The Iron Lady

perennial appeal of Tory Governments seeking re-election: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it.’ In 1983 the claim was rather that life was getting better under the Conservatives. It was admitted that the country had been through a tough three years, but the rewards were now becoming clear: inflation and interest rates were coming down, economic activity was picking up and unemployment – the Government’s Achilles heel – would soon begin to fall as prosperity returned. The warning was the same, however: the return of a Labour Government would throw away all the hard-won gains.

A bland manifesto, giving no hostages to fortune, was all that was needed to win the election. The opposition parties – divided, poorly led and easily dismissed as respectively extreme (Labour) and woolly (the SDP-Liberal Alliance) – offered no serious challenge to Mrs Thatcher’s inevitable return. Yet the failure to put forward a positive programme for its second term, besides being democratically dishonest, left the Government directionless after the election, prey to untoward events for which it tried to compensate, as the next contest approached, with hasty initiatives.

The trouble was that Labour offered too easy a target. Even after the defection of the SDP in 1981, the party was still riven by a bitter civil war.The hard left had seized control of the party’s internal arrangements – the mechanism for electing the leader, the selection of candidates and the formation of policy. Yet senior social democrats like Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman remained in the Shadow Cabinet, visibly unhappy but helpless to arrest the leftward slide. In Michael Foot the party was stuck with an elderly leader, elected in a vain effort to preserve unity, whom the electorate found it impossible to imagine as Prime Minister: his approval rating – rarely over 20 per cent – was consistently the lowest since polling began. Moreover, as the election approached, Labour saddled itself with an entire platform of unpopular left-wing policies, any one of which might have rendered the party unelectable: wholesale nationalisation, massive public spending, the restoration of trade- union privileges, withdrawal from Europe and unilateral nuclear disarmament. If the Tories’ manifesto was vague, Labour’s was appallingly specific: Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed it ‘the longest suicide note in history’.¹⁶ Of all its suicidal policies the most crippling handicap was Foot’s passionate commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Not for half a century had the major parties been so far apart on the issue of national defence. Ever since 1945 a broad consensus had obtained between the two front benches on the question of nuclear weapons. The left had kept up a more or less constant agitation for unilateral disarmament; but successive Labour leaders had maintained a firm line on the retention of the British independent deterrent. Now, with the election of a lifelong unilateralist to the leadership coinciding with a revival of support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that consensus was ended. For the first time, nuclear weapons were set to be a major issue at the coming General Election. In the triumphant afterglow of her Falklands victory nothing could have suited Mrs Thatcher better.

Ever since becoming Tory leader in 1975, she had taken a strong line on the need to maintain and modernise NATO’s nuclear defences against the Soviet nuclear threat. Her blunt warnings about Soviet expansionism had led the Russian press to christen her ‘the Iron Lady’, and she wore the intended insult with defiant pride. She had no interest in the polite bromides of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Communism but believed that the West was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Soviet Empire – a struggle which she confidently expected the West to win, though she did not foresee the timescale. As early as May 1980, in a newspaper interview on the first anniversary of her election, she was looking forward to the fall of Communism. ‘The major challenge to the Communist creed is coming now,’ she told The Times:

For years they were saying the march of communism and socialism is inevitable. Not now, not now. I would say that in the end the demise of the communist creed is inevitable, because it is not a creed for human beings with spirit who wish to live their own lives under the rule of law.¹⁷

In the Commons she promised to wage ‘the ideological struggle… as hard as I can’.¹⁸

That meant imposing sanctions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and trying to persuade British athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics. It meant supporting the struggle of the Polish Solidarity movement, which began in 1981, and keeping up the pressure over Soviet treatment of dissidents in breach of the Helsinki undertakings on human rights. It meant increasing Britain’s contribution to NATO military spending by 3 per cent, as she had promised in opposition. Above all, it meant firmly rejecting the siren call of nuclear disarmament and matching the Russians’ nuclear deployment missile for missile.

When the Conservatives came into office they were faced almost immediately with the need for a decision – which Labour had postponed – on replacing Britain’s obsolescent nuclear deterrent, Polaris. As is the way with nuclear decisions in every government, this one was confined to a small ad hoc subcommittee composed of the Prime Minister, her deputy, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor.¹⁹ They lost no time in opting to buy the American submarine-launched Trident system, at a cost of ?5 billion spread over ten years. The problem was that the expenditure could only be afforded by making cuts elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher, however, had no doubts. She believed passionately in nuclear weapons, both as a positively good thing in themselves, which had kept the peace in Europe for thirty years and would continue to do so as long as the balance of deterrence was preserved, but still more as an emblem of national power, prestige and independence. She never had any truck with the criticism that Britain’s ‘independent’ deterrent was in practice wholly dependent on the Americans for spares and maintenance and would never in any conceivable military circumstances be used without American consent. The decision to buy Trident, she told the Commons in July 1980, ‘leaves us master of our own destiny… We are resolved to defend our freedom.’²⁰

But then the Americans changed the arithmetic by developing a new, more sophisticated version of Trident. In January 1982 the Government had to decide all over again whether to buy the upgraded D5 model in place of the original C4, at still greater expense. Mrs Thatcher was worried, but she was still determined that Britain must have the best and latest system, whatever it cost. This time she deployed the full Cabinet to outnumber the doubters. She also drew on her special relationship with President Reagan to persuade him to let Britain buy the D5 on exceptionally favourable terms, assuring the Commons – like a housewife in a soap-powder commercial – that ‘the expenditure of this money secures a far greater degree of deterrence than expenditure of the same amount of money on ordinary conventional armaments’.²¹

Mrs Thatcher was also eager to accept the deployment of American cruise missiles at military bases in Britain as part of NATO’s response to Soviet SS-20s targeted on the West. The deployment of cruise in several European countries had first been proposed by the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as a way of locking the Americans into the defence of Europe at a time when it was feared they might otherwise walk away. Mrs Thatcher strongly supported it, not only to keep the Americans committed but also to demonstrate Europe’s willingness to share the burden of its own defence. She was witheringly scornful when the Germans and other European governments began to weaken in the face of anti-nuclear protests; but at the same time she relished the opportunity to demonstrate once again that Britain was America’s only reliable ally. When Britain agreed in September 1979 to station 144 cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire and RAF Molesworth in Cam- bridgeshire, the announcement caused little stir. But over the next three years, as the time for deployment approached, the mood changed. Increased tension between the superpowers, the spectre of a new nuclear arms race and the West’s rejection of several plausible-sounding Soviet disarmament offers fuelled a Europe-wide revival of the fear of nuclear war, fanned by a widespread perception of Ronald Reagan as a sort of trigger-happy cowboy who might be tempted to use nuclear weapons against what he called (in March 1983) ‘the evil empire’.²² In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), dormant since the early 1960s, suddenly sprang back to life, drawing large numbers to marches, rallies and demonstrations. Moreover, its cause was now backed by the official opposition.

Mrs Thatcher welcomed a fight on the issue, first because she thought defence more fundamental even than economics; second because she believed that unilateral disarmament was absolutely wrong in principle and would make nuclear war more likely, not less; and third because she was confident that the country agreed with her. Opinion polls reflected public anxiety about specific weapons systems. Yet when it came to the point the public overwhelmingly wanted to retain Britain’s independent nuclear capacity. Keeping the bomb was at bottom, for the electorate as for Mrs Thatcher, a matter of national pride and identity. She was scornful of the woolly-minded wishful thinking of those who imagined that the USSR would respond in kind if the West tamely dismantled its weapons. ‘Any policy of unilateral disarmament,’ she told the Commons in June 1980, ‘is a policy of unilateral