John Major concentrated – so far as Mrs Thatcher was concerned – on whether she knew that the 1985 guidelines were secretly relaxed in 1988, when the Iran – Iraq war ended. But this was a very minor issue. More important is the overwhelming evidence that she knew – she must have known – that the guidelines had been worthless ever since 1985.
For one thing she received a quarterly report listing arms sales, country by country, all round the world, and she had given explicit approval to a substantial (and unannounced) level of exports to Iraq. Of course the undercover trade might have been omitted from this list. But she also received intelligence reports, and we know that she read them avidly. More specifically, Scott quotes an intelligence digest dated 29 March 1988 – before the guidelines were changed – summarising the British machine-tool industry’s involvement in Iraqi weapons manufacture and singling out Matrix Churchill as ‘heavily involved’. This was initialled by Mrs Thatcher.51
Then there was the fact that large amounts of British equipment reached Iraq indirectly via other countries – notably Jordan. In her evidence to the Scott Inquiry, Mrs Thatcher claimed to have been deeply shocked by the discovery of this ‘glaring loophole’ (as Scott called it).52 She attached great importance to Britain’s relationship with Jordan and took pride in the three big arms deals she had made with King Hussein since 1979 – suspiciously large for such a tiny country. Other ministers followed her lead in claiming to have no idea that much of this equipment was destined for Iraq. But as usual there was one exception. Alan Clark told Scott that it was common gossip in the MoD that ‘more than half the material purchased by Iraq was actually consigned to Jordan’. An instance came to light in 1983 when HM Customs intercepted a consignment of 200 sub-machine guns bound for Iraq via Jordan: three men were charged and fined, but their conviction was later set aside.53 But Mrs Thatcher did not need customs to tell her that this was happening. In October 1985 the Joint Intelligence Committee circulated a confidential document entitled ‘Use of Jordanian facilities for the transshipment of war material to Iraq’; and the Scott Inquiry was given details of twenty-five more intelligence reports on the same subject between 1986 and 1991.54 Is it possible that the Prime Minister read none of them? She had certainly done so by July 1990 when she commissioned from the Cabinet Office a document known as the ‘Iraqnote’ tracing the history of defence exports to Iraq, which stated: ‘Iraq systematically uses Jordan as a cover for her procurement activities almost certainly with the connivance of senior figures within the Jordanian administration.’55 Her pretence that this came as a great shock to her the following month is demonstrably untrue.
The scandal of the arms trade to Iraq only began to unravel in the last months of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, and the Scott Inquiry concentrated largely on when she had known what after 1988. But the covert arming of Iraq had begun very much earlier, in 1981, and was well established during her second term, when British manufacturers were given every encouragement and assistance to export military equipment energetically to Iraq, both directly and (via Jordan) indirectly, in cynical contradiction of the Government’s professed policy of scrupulous restriction. There is ample evidence that Mrs Thatcher both knew of and encouraged this policy: it would have been very remarkable if she had not. So why did she do it? She was not normally cynical, and she prided herself on her high ethical standards. The answer is twofold.
First, she genuinely believed that every country was entitled to purchase the means to defend itself, that a free trade in armaments promoted peace, not war, and that others would sell them if Britain did not. Second, however, her Manichean world view disposed her to the dangerous doctrine that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. If Iran was the enemy of the West, then it was in Britain’s interest to help arm Iraq. In her own mind she knew that it was right, even though it might be difficult to defend the policy to Parliament. So she closed her mind to the impropriety of deceiving Parliament, and probably also deceived herself. But there can be no doubt that she both willed the end and winked at the means. The policy stemmed from the same robust world view that she applied to every area of her foreign policy, from the Falklands war to nuclear disarmament, from the bombing of Libya to the ending of apartheid. But in all those theatres she stood up boldly for what she believed. In the case of Iraq the execution of her policy required that Parliament was systematically misled over a period of eight or nine years. This was a major stain on her record.
18
Enemies Within
A need for enemies
ONE of Margaret Thatcher’s defining characteristics as a politician was a need for enemies. To fuel the aggression that drove her career she had to find new antagonists all the time to be successively demonised, confronted and defeated. This is unusual: the normal instinct of politicians the world over is to seek agreement, defuse opposition and find consensus. The taste for confrontation is particularly alien to the British Tory party, whose traditional preference has always been to emphasise national unity around common values. By contrast Mrs Thatcher actively despised consensus: she needed always to fight and to win. She viewed the world as a battleground of opposed forces – good and evil, freedom and tyranny, ‘us’ against ‘them’. The overriding global struggle between capitalism and Communism was reflected at the domestic British level by the opposition of Conservative and Labour, and more generally in a fundamental distinction between, on one side, ‘our people’ – honest, hard-working, law-abiding, mainly middle-class or aspiring middle-class taxpayers, consumers and home-owners – and, on the other, a ragtag army of shirkers, scroungers, socialists, trade unionists, ‘wets’, liberals, fellow-travelling intellectuals and peace campaigners. All these anti-social elements had to be taken on and beaten to make a world safe for Thatcherism.
The second term was the time to deal with her domestic opponents. For most of her first term she was on the back foot. But once the Falklands had helped her to survive the crises of her first three years, Mrs Thatcher returned to office with a clear intention to take the offensive. She had routed the Labour party at the polls. But socialism was a many-headed hydra, which still held important citadels of power beyond Westminster, and which must be reduced before the Thatcherite vision of Britain could be fully realised. Two, above all, threatened her authority. First, left-wing Labour councils still controlled local government in most of the country’s major cities: most visibly, just over the river from Westminster, the leader of the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone, was mounting a cheekily provocative challenge which she could not endure. She had already determined in the 1983 manifesto to deal with Livingstone by the simple expedient of abolishing the GLC (and with it the other metropolitan councils). That, however, would require legislation. Meanwhile, she faced a still more dangerous challenge from the Tories’ old nemesis, the National Union of Mineworkers, now headed by the militant class warrior and would- be revolutionary Arthur Scargill, openly bent on destroying her government as he had previously destroyed Heath’s. Having prudently backed off in 1981, Mrs Thatcher was now ready for this challenge too. But first she signalled a tough new attitude to trade unionism by picking a fight with the small but significant group of white- collar workers employed at the Government’s top-secret satellite listening post, Government Communications Headquarters, based at Cheltenham.
The problem of trade unionists at GCHQ had caught her attention during the 1981 Civil Service strike. The fact that striking tax collectors cost the Government ?350 million in lost revenue merely irritated her; but the idea that intelligence personnel could endanger national security by industrial action enraged her, confirming her suspicion that trade unionism was fundamentally anti-patriotic. Codebreakers, she believed, should no more be unionised than members of the armed forces. She wanted to ban unions from GCHQ there and then, but at that time she was talked out of it. The Americans had been alarmed by the disruption of intelligence, however, and Mrs Thatcher placed the highest priority on Britain’s intelligence relationship with the US. Particularly after the Falklands and Grenada crises she wanted to assure them that it would not be repeated. So in January 1984, with no prior consultation with the unions concerned, she persuaded Howe to announce an immediate ban on GCHQ employees belonging to unions.
The case was a reasonable one – MI5 and MI6 were not unionised, and it was something of an historical
