The Iron Lady

realist. ‘You cannot disinvent the nuclear weapon,’ she told the Daily Express in April, ‘any more than you can disinvent dynamite.’¹⁰⁶ She was right; but she did seem to make the argument with a disturbing relish.

Reagan’s demarche at Reykjavik briefly shook her confidence in the American alliance. But her wobble did not last long. Having gained the reassurance she sought, at least for the moment, she redoubled her commitment to NATO. She was still alarmed by the speed with which the Americans were pressing on with INF cuts and then cuts in short-range battlefield weapons. She worried that the Russians were skilfully drawing the Americans into agreements which undermined the West’s deterrent capability; while Reagan’s willingness to do a private deal with Gorbachev still gave her nightmares. But she took comfort from the fact that, as she told a CBS interviewer in July 1987, ‘they did not come to an agreement… It did not happen.’ She was determined to see that it never happened; but she admits in her memoirs that the unshakeable importance of nuclear deterrence was ‘the one issue on which I knew I could not take the Reagan Administration’s soundness for granted’.¹⁰⁷

At the same time, paradoxically, her other special relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev flourished, highlighted by a triumphal visit to Moscow in March 1987. This was a shameless piece of pre-election theatre designed to play well on television screens at home, projecting the Prime Minister as a world leader as welcome in the Kremlin as she was in the White House.

First, she had another seven hours of formal talks with Gorbachev, plus several social meetings. As before, their conversation ranged widely from the relative merits of Communism and capitalism to regional conflicts, arms control and the future of nuclear weapons. Once again Gorbachev gave as good as he got, rejecting Mrs Thatcher’s criticism of Soviet subversion in Africa and Central America and meeting her lectures about human rights by pointing out the inequality of British society. But when she repeated her objection that eliminating strategic weapons would leave the Russians with conventional superiority in Europe, he admitted Moscow’s opposite fear of being unable to match America’s military spending. ‘He was clearly extremely sensitive and worried about being humiliated by the West.’¹⁰⁸

Just as important as her talks with Gorbachev, however, was the fact that she was also allowed to meet privately a number of prominent dissidents, most notably the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife Elena, who were now supporting Gorbachev’s perestroika, and a number of Jewish refuseniks who exemplified its limits. She was permitted to attend a Russian Orthodox service at Zagorsk, forty-five miles outside Moscow, where she spoke to some of the worshippers and lit a candle symbolising freedom of conscience. Above all she was granted unprecedented access to the Soviet public. She was given fifty minutes unedited prime time on the main television channel, and she seized her chance brilliantly. Rather than talk straight to camera she insisted on being interviewed, so that she could be seen to argue with her three interviewers in the same way that she argued with Gorbachev. When they dutifully trotted out the party line and questioned how she could support nuclear weapons, she repeatedly interrupted them, contradicted them and tried to convince them from Russia’s own experience of invasion and war. ‘The Soviet Union suffered millions of losses in the Second World War,’ she reminded them:

The Soviet Union had a lot of conventional weapons. That did not stop Hitler attacking her. Conventional weapons have never been enough to stop wars. Since we have had the nuclear weapon, it is so horrific that no one dare risk going to war.

At the same time she told them bluntly that the Soviet Union had far more nuclear weapons than any other country; that it was the Soviet Union which had introduced intermediate-range weapons by deploying SS-20s, forcing the West to match them with Pershing and cruise; and the Soviet Union which had led the United States in developing anti-missile laser defences in the 1970s. The three stooges had no answer to this assault. The impact of her spontaneity was sensational. ‘Her style, her appearance, her frankness about security matters made her appear like a creature from another planet,’ wrote the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Martin Walker, ‘ – and they found her terrific.’¹⁰⁹

Finally, she undertook an unprecedented walkabout in a Moscow housing estate, meeting and talking to ordinary Russians who flocked to meet and touch her. ‘Journalists with no liking for her at all came back from Moscow saying that they had never witnessed anything like it.’¹¹⁰ The experience confirmed her faith that the peoples of the Soviet empire would eventually throw off their yoke. Her 1987 visit – for which Gorbachev also deserves credit – was almost certainly a factor in hastening the collapse of the Soviet system only three years later.

Undoubtedly Lady Thatcher played a part in the sudden ending of the Cold War in 1989 – 91. In retirement, she counted her championing of Gorbachev among her greatest achievements. But how much influence she really had is questionable. Events in the Soviet Union had a momentum of their own which even Gorbachev was unable to control. She certainly helped convince Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could never win the arms race, that Reagan would not give up ‘Star Wars’ but was nevertheless serious in wanting to engage in balanced arms reductions. Her relationship with Reagan and to a lesser extent with Gorbachev enabled her to punch – or at least appear to punch – above Britain’s real weight in the world. For a heady time in the late 1980s she almost seemed to have recreated the wartime triumvirate of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. But her role should not be exaggerated. Just as in 1945, only more so, Britain was always the junior partner. It was the Americans who called the shots; and the brief illusion of equality was swiftly exposed when Reagan was succeeded by George Bush.

Meanwhile, her love affair with America pulled Britain away from Europe.

17 Iron Lady II: Europe and the World

Good European

DURING Mrs Thatcher’s first term her relations with her European partners had been poisoned by the interminable wrangle over Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. Later, her third term would be dominated by her increasingly bitter opposition to closer economic integration. Despite her strong bias towards the United States, however, her middle period (1983–7) was an interlude of improving relations with Europe. It was, as it turned out, only a temporary calm between two storms; but once the budget question had finally been resolved at Fontainebleau in June 1984, Britain actually took the lead for a time in Community affairs, with Mrs Thatcher the leading advocate of a rapid completion of the single European market.

Even in her most positive period, however, she set in hand no long-term thinking about the future of Europe or Britain’s place in it. She simply dismissed as fantasy the idea that there could ever be a ‘United States of Europe in the same way that there is a United States of America’;¹ and assumed that her own idea of what the EC should be – a free-trade area and a forum for loose cooperation between sovereign nations – would naturally prevail.² As a result, from lack of imaginative empathy with other views and lack of her usual thorough homework, she failed to take seriously the fact that most other European governments had a quite different conception of how Europe should develop. They had given a good deal more thought to how to achieve their goal than she ever did to how she might prevent it.

Her relations with her Community partners were greatly improved in 1981 by the replacement of the haughty and supercilious Giscard d’Estaing as President of France by the veteran socialist Francois Mitterrand. Though on the face of it Mitterrand and Mrs Thatcher might have been thought to be chalk and cheese, they actually got on unexpectedly well. First, he was a very sexy man with the confidence to treat her as a woman – and she responded, as she often did to a sexual challenge. Far more explicitly than with Reagan, there was an