protectiveness towards her playboy son, Mrs Thatcher is the link between two utterly opposed moral systems which reflect not only the ambivalence of her own personality but the story of Britain in the twentieth century: Alfred Roberts to Mark Thatcher in three generations.
16
Iron Lady I: Special Relationships
Mrs Thatcher and the Foreign Office
BY the time she embarked on her second term in June 1983, Mrs Thatcher was far more confident in foreign affairs than she had been in 1979. Then she had been the new girl on the international block, admittedly inexperienced and up against established leaders at the head of all her major allies: Jimmy Carter in Washington, Helmut Schmidt in Bonn and Valery Giscard d’Estaing in Paris. But already by October 1982 – when Schmidt was replaced by Helmut Kohl – she was boasting in her constituency that she was now the most senior Western leader.1 (She did not count Pierre Trudeau, who had been Prime Minister of Canada on and off since 1968.) The longer she remained in office, the more she was able to exploit what she called in her memoirs the ‘huge and cumulative advantage in simply being known both by politicians and by ordinary people around the world’.2 She had scored a notable diplomatic success in Zimbabwe, partial victory on the European budget issue and above all a stunning military triumph in the Falklands. Before the Paras had even landed in San Carlos Bay she was proclaiming, in refutation of Dean Acheson’s famous gibe that Britain had ‘lost an empire and not yet found a role’: ‘I believe Britain
From now on she travelled extensively and was royally received wherever she went; she milked her global celebrity to the full. But she always travelled with a purpose, to promote her views and British interests, not just to inform herself as she had done in opposition. Wherever she went she exploited the Falklands triumph as a symbol of Britain’s rebirth under her leadership, her resolution in the cause of freedom, and proven military prowess. ‘Better than any Prime Minister since Macmillan,’ David Reynolds has written, ‘she understood that prestige was a form of power.’4 Every foreign leader who came to London, however insignificant, wanted to be photographed with Madame Thatcher to boost his prestige back home. She posed with them all in front of the fireplace in the entrance hall of Number Ten, and sent them away with a lecture about the free market or the need to combat Communism.[h]
Like all long-serving Prime Ministers, she increasingly wished to be her own Foreign Secretary. She quickly replaced Francis Pym with the more amenable Geoffrey Howe, then treated Howe as little more than her bag carrier, entrusted with the tiresome detail of diplomacy while she handled all the important conversations. She liked dealing directly with the heads of government but had no inhibitions about receiving their foreign ministers or lesser emissaries and thoroughly enjoyed subjecting them to the same sort of interrogation she gave her own ministers: few of them came up to scratch. As Charles Powell put it: ‘She was ready to go toe-to-toe with any world leader from Gorbachev to Deng Xiaoping… She had the huge advantage of being unembarrassable.’6 As a woman she could say things to foreign leaders – most of whom had little experience of female politicians – that no male Prime Minister could have got away with.7
Howe and Mrs Thatcher made an excellent partnership precisely because he was the perfect foil to her rampaging style. She positively prided herself on being undiplomatic; but for that very reason she needed him to smooth ruffled feathers and mend broken fences in her wake. In truth she resented the fact that the policies she followed were very often closer to Foreign Office advice than her rhetoric implied. Howe deserves as much of the credit for her foreign policy successes in the second term as he does for holding firm at the Treasury in the first.
Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that the Foreign Office – officially the Foreign and Commonwealth Office – was a limp institution dedicated to giving away Britain’s vital interests had only been reinforced by her experience since 1979. After the Falklands war she appointed Sir Anthony Parsons, fresh from his brilliant performance at the UN, to be her private foreign-policy adviser in Number Ten. A large part of Parsons’ job, as he described it, was to try to anticipate crises, so that she would not be ‘caught short again as she had been over the Falklands’.8 He stayed for only a year, but was replaced by Sir Percy Cradock, a China specialist who initially handled the Hong Kong negotiations but stayed on to become her general foreign-policy adviser right up to 1990.
Increasingly she travelled with no Foreign Office presence in her party at all, but was accompanied even on important trips only by her own private entourage. When she first visited President Reagan in 1981, for example, she took with her a whole phalanx of senior mandarins and several juniors. By the time she flew right round the world from Beijing and Hong Kong to bend the President’s ear about his ‘Star Wars’ programme in December 1984 she was accompanied only by her two private secretaries, Robin Butler and Charles Powell, and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. And towards the end it was usually just Powell and Ingham.
She continued to seek foreign-policy advice from independent academic experts outside the Foreign Office. Though to an extent these tended to tell her what she wanted to hear – or, more accurately, she chose advisers who would tell her what she wanted to hear – it is to her credit that she tried to go beyond the narrow circle of official advice. Nevertheless both her special advisers, Parsons and Cradock, were former FCO insiders; and the most influential of all from 1984 onwards – Charles Powell – was, ironically, a Foreign Office man
A career diplomat in his early forties, Powell succeeded John Coles as Mrs Thatcher’s foreign-affairs private secretary in June 1984 and immediately established an exceptional rapport with her. The basis of their relationship was his skill at drafting: he was brilliant at finding acceptable diplomatic language to express what she wanted to say without fudging it. Second, he needed as little sleep as she did: he was unflagging and ever-present, never went to bed but seemed to be always at her side. In addition, he had a knack of getting things done by informal personal diplomacy of his own: he would go direct to Washington or Paris, behind the back of the official Foreign Office, and fix what she wanted with a word in the right place. He came to be seen as the second most powerful figure in the Government, no longer confined exclusively to foreign affairs but the real deputy Prime Minister, practically her
After three or four years, by normal Whitehall practice it would have been time for Powell to move on, but Mrs Thatcher refused to let him go. This might not have mattered if he had been just an indispensable Jeeves. But, in fact, the longer he stayed the more his views began to influence Mrs Thatcher’s. Whereas in the earlier years of her premiership Mrs Thatcher was surrounded by overwhelmingly pro-European advice, from about 1986 Powell’s informed and articulate Euroscepticism increasingly encouraged her to follow her own anti-Community and anti- German prejudice – with serious consequences both for herself and for Britain.
For most of her premiership, however, she actually followed Foreign Office advice far more than she liked to pretend – on Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe and even during her second term on the EC. Though she went to war for the Falklands, she liquidated most of the last vestiges of empire around the world; though famously hostile to Communism, she was persuaded that she could do business with a new generation of Soviet leaders; though an instinctive Unionist, she was likewise persuaded that the only chance of peace in Northern Ireland was with the involvement of Dublin; and against her instinct she took the decisive steps in committing Britain to an integrated Europe.
Judged by the objectives she set herself, she was ‘hugely successful’ in foreign affairs.10 First, she played Ronald Reagan skilfully to revive and maximise the US ‘special relationship’; then she spotted and encouraged Mikhail Gorbachev, and acted successfully as an intermediary between him and Reagan. She finally settled the EC budget row and went on to set the pace in promoting the introduction of a single European market.
