The Iron Lady

took place a few days before the Argentine surrender, at the climax of her military triumph. As well as meeting the Prime Minister in Downing Street, the President went riding with the Queen in Windsor Great Park and addressed members of both Houses of Parliament in the Royal Gallery, where he overcame a sceptical audience by praising Britain’s principled stand in the Falklands and borrowing freely from Churchill in asserting the moral superiority of the West. Freedom and democracy, he predicted, would ‘leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history’.[i] While the rest of his visit to Europe was disrupted by anti-nuclear demonstrations, the warmth of his reception in London moved the ‘special relationship’ visibly on to a new level.²³

At subsequent summits Reagan treated Mrs Thatcher explicitly as his prime ally. He was particularly pleased that she found time to attend the Williamsburg summit in the middle of the June 1983 election. White House files show how his staff coordinated with hers to advance their joint agenda, and afterwards he thanked her for her help. ‘Thanks to your contribution during Saturday’s dinner discussion of INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces],’ he told her, ‘we were able to send to the Soviets a clear signal of allied determination and unity.’²⁴ And before the London meeting the following year he wrote to her that he planned to provide her with ‘the same stalwart support’ that she had given him at Williamsburg.²⁵ They made a powerful and well-rehearsed double act.

From now on Mrs Thatcher invited herself to Washington at the drop of a hat. As soon as she had secured her re-election in June 1983 she asked to come over in September ‘to continue bilateral discussions with the President’.²⁶ ‘She will speak plainly about British interests’, the US Embassy in London warned, ‘and will appreciate plain speaking from us’.²⁷ Henceforth this was the basis of the relationship, as Lady Thatcher explicitly acknowledged in her memoirs: ‘I regarded the quid pro quo for my strong public support of the President as being the right to be direct with him and members of his Administration in private.’²⁸ ‘She not only had her say,’ Richard Perle remembered, ‘but was frequently the dominant influence in decision-making.’²⁹

If, as an outsider, she was able to have this degree of influence, it was because, compared withWhitehall,Washington is highly decentralised. American government is a continuous struggle between different agencies – the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Adviser, the CIA and others – all competing for the President’s ear. Well briefed by the British Embassy, Mrs Thatcher knew the balance of views on every issue and where her intervention, judiciously applied, might be decisive. It was well known that Reagan did not like quarrelling with her, so those Presidential advisers on her side of a particular argument had every incentive to deploy her to clinch their case. George Shultz, who replaced Al Haig as Secretary of State in the summer of 1983, recalled that he always found her influence with Reagan ‘very constructive’, and was ‘shameless’ in calling on her aid when required.³⁰ Others, however, found her interventions maddening.

When she could not come to Washington in person, she would write or telephone. She regularly reported to Reagan her views on other leaders she had met on her travels, and pressed her ideas of the action he should take in the Middle East or other trouble spots. Sometimes their letters were purely personal, as when they remembered each other’s birthdays, congratulated one another on being re-elected, or expressed horror and relief when the other narrowly escaped assassination. At least once, at the height of the miners’ strike in 1984, Reagan simply sent his friend a note of encouragement. ‘Dear Margaret,’ he wrote:

In recent weeks I have thought often of you with considerable empathy as I follow the activities of the miners and dockworkers’ unions. I know they present a difficult set of issues for your government. I just wanted you to know that my thoughts are with you as you address these important issues; I’m confident as ever that you and your government will come out of this well. Warm regards, Ron.³¹

Two years later, when Reagan in turn was in trouble over damaging revelations about his administration’s involvement in the exchange of arms for the release of Iranian hostages, in defiance of its declared policy, Mrs Thatcher rushed publicly to his defence: ‘I believe implicitly in the President’s total integrity on that subject,’ she told a press conference in Washington.³² As the Iran – Contra scandal deepened the following year and America was seized by a mood of gloomy introspection, she visited Washington again – fresh from her own second re-election – and toured the television studios, vigorously denying that Reagan was politically weakened and defending his honour. ‘I have dealt with the President for many, many years,’ she told a CBS interviewer, ‘and I have absolute trust in him.’ Moreover, she insisted, ‘America is a strong country, with a great President, a great people and a great future. Cheer up! Be more upbeat!… You should have as much faith in America as I have.’³³

Such fulsome encomiums, repeated every time she went to Washington and lapped up by the American media, were regularly condemned by her opponents at home for showing an excessive degree of grovelling subordination.Yet the truth is that in her private dealings with Washington she never grovelled. On a whole range of issues, from the Falklands to nuclear disarmament, on which she had differences with the Americans, she fought her corner vigorously. As Richard Perle remembered: ‘She never approached the conversations she had… with American officials and with the President from a position of supplication or inferiority. Quite the contrary.’³⁴

Her first battle was over the consequences for British firms of American sanctions on the Soviet Union following the imposition of martial law in Poland in December 1981. She passionately supported the Polish Solidarity movement and was all in favour of concerted Western action to deter the Russians from crushing the flicker of freedom in Poland as they had done in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. But the Americans’ chosen sanction was to halt the construction of an oil pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe, which they proposed to enforce by applying sanctions to European firms, including the British company John Brown Engineering, which had legitimate existing contracts to build the pipeline. This, Mrs Thatcher objected, would hurt the Europeans more than the Russians, while it was not matched by comparable American sacrifices: the Americans had actually ended an embargo on grain exports to Russia which was hitting American farmers in the Midwest. She also objected to the Americans trying to impose American laws on British firms operating outside the USA.

For once she was speaking for Europe against America. In truth she was fighting for British interests, but, with her usual ability to clothe national interest in a cloak of principle, she was also standing up for sovereignty and the rule of law against American extraterritorial arrogance. ‘The question is whether one very powerful nation can prevent existing contracts being fulfilled,’ she told the House of Commons on 1 July. ‘I think it is wrong to do so.’³⁵ The British Government instructed John Brown not to comply with the US embargo.

Yet her main concern was still to prevent damage to the Alliance. ‘The only fly in the ointment,’ she told Weinberger in September, ‘is the John Brown thing.’ ‘She fervently hoped,’ he cabled Reagan, ‘that what the US did would be so minimal that she could ignore it. She desperately needed some face-saving solution.’ Characteristically she was worried about fuelling anti-Americanism. ‘Mrs Thatcher said she had a serious problem with unemployment and bankruptcies, and she didn’t want her closest friend, the United States, to be blamed by her people.’³⁶

As so often, she knew that she had allies in Washington. In this instance her pressure helped the new Secretary of State, George Shultz, to get the pipeline ban lifted in return for a package of joint measures limiting Soviet imports and the export of technology to Russia.Telling her of his decision on 12 November, Reagan thanked her – and Pym and the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Oliver Wright – for helping achieve this consensus.³⁷ This was the special relationship in action.

But the Polish pipeline question was just one of a number of ‘chronic economic irritants’ which Mrs Thatcher felt she had to raise with the Americans every time she visited Washington in the mid-1980s. ³⁸ First there was the fallout of British Airways’ price war with Freddie Laker’s independent airline, Laker Airways, which succeeded in forcing the price-cutting upstart out of business in 1982. Much as she admired Laker as a model entrepreneur, Mrs Thatcher was worried that an American Justice Department investigation into BA’s unscrupulous methods was holding up plans to privatise the national carrier. In March 1983 she appealed ‘personally and urgently’ to Reagan to suspend the investigation, once again threatening that it ‘could have the most serious consequences for British airlines’ and warning that if it was not stopped, ‘our aviation relationship will be damaged and the harm could go wider’.³⁹ Advised by his staff that he could not interfere in the judicial process, Reagan replied regretfully that ‘in this case I feel that I do not have the latitude to respond to your concerns’.⁴⁰ But seven months later he did stop the investigation – an ‘almost unprecedented’