The Iron Lady

undertake to inform you in advance should our forces take part in the proposed collective security force, or of whatever political or diplomatic efforts we plan to pursue. It is of some assurance to know I can count on your support and advice on this important issue.’⁵³

Mrs Thatcher received this message before she went out to dinner but, in view of the promise of further consultation, did not think it required an immediate reply. Only three hours later, however, at ten o’clock, there came a second, much shorter cable, in which the President informed her curtly: ‘I have decided to respond positively to this request.’

Our forces will establish themselves in Grenada. The collective Caribbean security force will disembark on Grenada shortly thereafter… We will inform you of further developments as they occur. Other allies will be apprised of our actions after they are begun.

I expect that a new provisional government will be formed in Grenada shortly after the collective security force arrives. We hope that Her Majesty’s government will join us by extending support to Grenada’s new leaders.⁵⁴

What these two cables clearly show is that the Americans were perfectly well aware of Britain’s primary responsibility in Grenada, but had decided that Mrs Thatcher’s support for unilateral US action could be taken for granted. As a robust Cold Warrior, they assumed, the Iron Lady would applaud the suppression of a Communist coup anywhere in the world. But if they thought she would be gratified to be informed a few hours before the other allies, they were badly mistaken. She was outraged, first that the Americans should think of invading the Queen’s territory, which touched in her the same patriotic trigger as the Argentine invasion of the Falklands; worse still that they should do it without telling her. There is no doubt that she felt personally let down. But she did not get on the telephone immediately. First she held a midnight meeting with Howe and Michael Heseltine. They agreed a reply setting out Britain’s objections to military action and urging the Americans to hold their hand. In addition, Mrs Thatcher worried that America intervening militarily in the Caribbean would be used by the Russians to legitimise their invasion of Afghanistan. She told her staff that she remembered seeing newspaper placards in 1956 reading ‘Britain Invades Egypt’ and knew instantly that it was wrong.⁵⁵

Only after sending Britain’s reasoned objection did she telephone Reagan, at about two o’clock in the morning, London time. Unfortunately no transcript of her call was made. But both Howe, in his memoirs, and Mrs Thatcher at the time, contradict the story that she gave the President an earful. All she did was to ask him to consider carefully the advice in her cabled message. So much for her giving Reagan ‘a prime ticking off’.

A few hours later – just before 7.00 a.m. in London, just before 2.00 a.m. in Washington and only three hours before the troops landed – came Reagan’s reply, diplomatic but uncompromising. He thanked Mrs Thatcher for her ‘thoughtful message’, claimed to have ‘weighed very carefully’ the issues she had raised, but insisted that while he appreciated the dangers inherent in a military operation, ‘on balance, I see this as the lesser of two risks’. He stressed the danger of Soviet influence in Grenada, felt that he had no choice but to intervene, and repeated his hope that ‘as we proceed, in cooperation with the OECS countries, we would have the active cooperation of Her Majesty’s Government’ and the support of the Governor-General in establishing an interim government.⁵⁶

That afternoon Howe had to explain to the Commons why he had inadvertently misled the House the day before. He still claimed to have kept ‘closely in touch’ with the American Government over the weekend, and confirmed that he and Mrs Thatcher had opposed military intervention; but he could not deny that their advice had not been asked until it was too late and had been ignored when given. He could not endorse the American action, but neither could he condemn it, leaving himself open to the mockery of Denis Healey, who savaged the Government’s ‘impression of pitiable impotence’. Not for the first time, he charged, Mrs Thatcher had allowed ‘President Reagan to walk all over her’.⁵⁷

Next day – during an uncomfortable Commons debate – Reagan rang to apologise for the embarrassment he had caused her. This time the transcript shows Mrs Thatcher to have been uncharacteristically monosyllabic. But the action was under way now and she hoped it would be successful.

When her turn came to face questions in the Commons, Mrs Thatcher was obliged to put the best face possible on her humiliation. Needled by Labour glee at the breach of her special relationship, she made the best case she could for the American action, recalling that they had intervened to restore democracy in Dominica in exactly the same way in 1965.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, she was still seething. ‘That man!’, she railed. ‘After all I’ve done for him, he didn’t even consult me.’⁵⁹ On a late-night BBC World Service phone-in, she vented her fury on an American caller who accused her of failing to stand alongside the Americans in fighting Communism:

We in the Western countries, the Western democracies, use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into other people’s countries, independent sovereign territories… If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people… there the United States shall enter, we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.⁶⁰

The Americans were bewildered by Mrs Thatcher’s attitude. They did not understand her sensitivity about the Commonwealth and could not see that their action was any different from what she herself had done in the Falklands. Senior members of the administration were angry that Britain did not give them the same support they had given Britain in the South Atlantic. Reagan regretted the dispute, but was unrepentant because he thought she was ‘just plain wrong’.⁶¹ And in due course, as it became clear that the invasion – unlike some other American military interventions – had been wholly successful in its limited objectives, Mrs Thatcher herself came to feel that she had been wrong to oppose it. At any rate she quickly put the episode behind her and set herself to making sure that there was no lasting damage to her most important international relationship.

The tension passed. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher’s initial reaction to Grenada was a telling glimpse of her ultimate priority. Disposed as she was to defer to American leadership, her instinct was to repel any infringement of what she saw as British – or in this case Commonwealth – sovereignty. Had she been consulted she might well have agreed to a joint operation to restore democracy. She wanted to be America’s partner, not its poodle. She was deeply hurt by Reagan’s failure to consult her, but the lesson she learned was that next time the Americans needed her she must not let them down.

The test came in April 1986, when Washington was provoked by a spate of terrorist attacks on American tourists and servicemen in Europe, presumed to be the work of Libyan agents. Libya’s eccentric President, Colonel Gaddafi, had been a particular bete noire of Reagan’s from the moment he entered the White House, and by 1986 Reagan was itching to punish him. When a TWA plane was sabotaged over Greece on 2 April, and five servicemen were killed by a bomb in a Berlin nightclub three days later, the President determined to bomb Tripoli in retaliation. The US plan involved using F-111s based in Britain, partly for accuracy, but also deliberately to involve the European allies in the action. But Reagan’s request put Mrs Thatcher on the spot at a time when her authority was weakened by the Westland crisis. France and Spain refused the Americans permission to overfly their territory; and Mrs Thatcher knew she would invite a political storm if she agreed to let the American mission fly from British bases.

Britain too had suffered from Libyan terrorism – notably the shooting of a London policewoman in 1984. MI5 had no doubt of Libya’s responsibility for the latest attacks. But again Mrs Thatcher worried about the legality of the proposed action. Just three months earlier, speaking to American journalists in London, she had explicitly condemned retaliatory action against terrorism. ‘I must warn you that I do not believe in retaliatory strikes that are against international law,’ she declared. ‘Once you start going across borders then I do not see an end to it… I uphold international law very firmly.’⁶² Some time earlier she had refused to endorse an Israeli attack on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Tunis, asking Garret FitzGerald to imagine what the Americans would say if Britain ‘bombed the Provos in Dundalk’.⁶³ She had also refused to follow a unilateral American embargo on Libyan oil.

But when Reagan asked her permission, late in the evening of 8 April, she felt that she had no choice but to agree. Particularly after Grenada, she could not afford to deny the Americans the payback to which they felt they were entitled after the Falklands. In her view – and theirs – this was what the Alliance was all about. ‘The cost to Britain of not backing American action,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘was unthinkable.’⁶⁴ Her only