‘The effect was like a trumpet blast of cheer to a government and people badly in need of reassurance from their allies,’ the British Ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, recorded.27 The rest of her visit was a triumph. On Henderson’s advice she was carefully non-polemical in her conversations with Carter; but then, addressing Congress, she threw off all restraint and wowed her audience with a ten-minute ‘harangue’ on the virtues of the free market and the evil of Communism, followed by questions which she handled with an informality and relish the like of which Washington had never seen before from a visiting leader. More than one Congressman invited her to accept the Republican nomination for President. She went on the next day to address an audience of 2,000 at the Foreign Policy Association in New York, where the directness of her message again made a tremendous hit. The Russians, she boasted, had called her the Iron Lady: ‘They’re quite right – I am.’28 In that moment – a year before Reagan entered the White House – MargaretThatcher became a heroine to the American right.days later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In her memoirs LadyThatcher described this action as ‘one of those genuine watersheds which are so often predicted, which so rarely occur’. She immediately saw the invasion as bearing out her warnings of worldwide Soviet expansionism, part of a pattern with Cuban and East German intervention in Angola and Namibia, all taking advantage of the West’s gullible belief in détente. She was determined that the Russians must be ‘punished for their aggression and taught, albeit belatedly, that the West would not only talk about freedom but was prepared to make sacrifices to defend it’.29 On this occasion Carter needed no prompting. When he rang her at Chequers three days after Christmas he likened the Soviet action to their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.‘In effect Moscow had changed a buffer nation into a puppet nation under Soviet direction,’ he told her. ‘This would have profound strategic consequences for the stability of the entire region… He did not think we could let the Soviets get away with this intervention with impunity.’ Mrs Thatcher agreed, ‘and observed that when something like this occurred it was important to act right at the beginning’.30 She quickly pledged British support for economic and cultural sanctions to punish the invader. In particular they agreed that the best way to hurt the Russians would be a Western boycott of the forthcoming Moscow Olympics. To her fury, however, she found that this was something she could not deliver. While the United States Olympic Committee did stay away from Moscow the following summer, most British athletes declined to give up their medal hopes at the behest of the Prime Minister.seriously she discovered that her call for a resolute response to the Soviet action was not supported by the rest of Europe. The invasion of Afghanistan sharply highlighted the gulf between American and European perceptions of the Cold War. The Europeans, particularly the Germans, had always gained more tangible benefits from détente, in the form of trade and cross-border cooperation, than the Americans and British, and were anxious not to jeopardise them.They were disinclined to view the Soviet action as part of a strategy of world domination, but rather as an understandable response to Iranian-type Islamic fundamentalism on their southern border. Mrs Thatcher’s instincts were strongly with the Americans; but to Washington’s disappointment she proved unable to deliver concerted European backing for significant sanctions.
‘The Bloody British Question’Mrs Thatcher could not bring her European partners with her on Afghanistan, this was partly because she had already antagonised them over Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. This was a matter she could not possibly leave to the Foreign Office, combining as it did her two favourite themes of patriotism and good housekeeping. It was exactly the sort of issue on which she thought the Foreign Office liable to give up vital British interests for the sake of being good Europeans. It offered a wonderful early opportunity to be seen battling for Britain on the international stage, cheered on by the tabloid press, on a simple issue that every voter could understand. At a time when the economy was already proving intractable, Europe offered a much more popular cause in which to display her determination not to compromise, and she seized it with relish. It took five years before she finally achieved a satisfactory settlement. The long battle helped set the style of her premiership. It also got her relationship with the European Community off to a bad start from which it never recovered.is no dispute that there was a genuine problem, left over from the original terms of Britain’s entry to the Community negotiated by Ted Heath in 1971 and not resolved by Callaghan’s essentially cosmetic renegotiation in 1974 – 5.The fundamental imbalance derived from the fact that Britain continued to import more than other members from outside the Community, so paying more in import levies, while having a much smaller farming sector, and consequently gaining much less benefit from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Over the past decade Britain’s growth had fallen behind that of other countries, so the budget contribution fixed in 1971 had become disproportionately high. By 1980 Britain was paying about £1,000 million a year more into the Community than she was getting out.existence of an imbalance was recognised in Brussels. Callaghan and his Foreign Secretary, David Owen, had been making efforts to correct it; but Labour was handicapped by its history of hostility to the Community. The election of a Conservative Government with a more positive attitude to Europe was expected to make agreement easier. Callaghan exaggerated when he told the House of Commons: ‘We took the shine off the ball, and it is now for her to hit the runs.’31 But with goodwill it should not have been difficult, by the normal processes of Community bargaining, to achieve an equitable adjustment without a bruising confrontation. The Foreign Office would have considered a rebate of about two-thirds both satisfactory and achievable.32 It was the heads of government on both sides of the Channel – Mrs Thatcher on one side, but equally Schmidt and Giscard on the other – who played to their domestic galleries and elevated the issue into a trial of political strength.chance the first overseas leader to visit London the week after the British election was Helmut Schmidt. Their talks in Downing Street actually went quite well. Though he was supposed to be a socialist, Mrs Thatcher approved of his sound economic views, while Schmidt in turn told the Bundestag (a touch patronisingly) that he was impressed by her ‘knowledge, authority and responsibility’.33 But she left the German Chancellor in no doubt that she regarded Britain’s present budget contribution as unacceptable and intended to seek a rebate. That was quite right and proper; but she soon struck a discordant note by talking truculently about getting ‘our’ money back, as though the Community had stolen it, and declaring that she was not going to be ‘a soft touch’, as though her European partners were a bunch of con men.34 This sort of talk went down badly in Paris, Bonn and Brussels, because it showed a fundamental failure to understand how the Community worked.of all, the Community did not recognise the concept of ‘her’ money; funds contributed by each member country belonged to the Community, to be expended by the Commission for the benefit of the Community as a whole. The idea of each member keeping a profit-and-loss account was strictly non-communautaire. Within this broad principle there was certainly a case that Britain was paying more than her fair share; but if Mrs Thatcher was going to be legalistic about it, her partners could argue that Britain had signed up in 1972 and could not now rewrite the contract because it had turned out to be disadvantageous. They were particularly unsympathetic since Britain’s economic position had now been transformed by North Sea oil, a benefit which no other member enjoyed. Moreover, in the wider context of European trade, the sums involved were really very small., Mrs Thatcher exasperated her partners – and not least the President of the Commission, Roy Jenkins, whose job it was to broker a deal – by insisting that Britain’s demand for a budget rebate should be treated as an issue entirely on its own, not settled as part of a wider package, as was the Community’s normal way. Schmidt and several of the other leaders were willing to help Britain, but they expected Mrs Thatcher in turn to be flexible and constructive in other difficult areas like lamb, fish, oil and the European Monetary System. This she adamantly refused. ‘We simply cannot do so,’ she told the Commons in March 1980.35 In opposition just twelve months earlier she had repeatedly condemned Labour’s counterproductive obstructiveness towards Europe.36 But now she wanted Britain’s grievance settled before she would allow progress on anything else.other leaders first realised what they were up against at the European Council at Strasbourg on 21 – 2 June, where Mrs Thatcher began by trying to get the budget issue placed first on the agenda, which naturally irritated Giscard. When they eventually reached it, Jenkins wrote in his diary, she ‘immediately became shrill’ and picked an unnecessary quarrel with Schmidt, ‘which was silly because he was absolutely crucial to her getting the result that she wanted’.37 She herself was well pleased with her performance. ‘I felt that I had made an impression as someone who meant business.’ She was delighted to overhear ‘a foreign government official’ comment that ‘Britain is back’ – ‘a stray remark that pleased me as much as anything I can remember’.38deliberately set out to be difficult. But Giscard and Schmidt, the experienced European statesmen, both in office since 1974, should have handled her better. After five years of Wilson and Callaghan, they had every reason to welcome the return of a British Government unambiguously committed to Europe. Giscard particularly welcomed British support for the French nuclear force de frappe.They should have set out to disarm her. Instead, at the purely personal level, Giscard as the host at Strasbourg went out of his way to snub her, first by failing to seat her next to himself at either lunch or dinner, and then by insisting on being served first – asserting his precedence as head of state over the normal courtesy due to her sex.39 French gallantry alone might have dictated an effort to make a fuss of her. She was susceptible to Gallic charm, as François Mitterrand later proved. Instead she thought Giscard’s behaviour, with reason, ‘petulant, vain and rather ill-mannered’.40 When the French President came back to dinner in Downing Street later that year she got her own back by deliberately seating him opposite full-length portraits of Nelson and Wellington.41 More seriously, the two European leaders (and Giscard in particular) seem to have decided that the way to deal with the British Prime Minister was to put her down.misjudged their woman. Once she had defined the issue as a trial of her strength, she would not – could not – back down. Carrington, caught uncomfortably in the crossfire, thought the Europeans’ handling of her was ‘pretty stupid… enormously short-sighted and selfish’.42 They would have done much better to have taken her aside right at the outset, before Strasbourg, and offered her a generous out-of-court settlement before the political stakes were raised too high. As it was, Mrs Thatcher spent the interval between Strasbourg and the next European Council at Dublin in November working herself into a position of determined intransigence. In Luxembourg in October to deliver a Winston Churchill memorial lecture, she declared truculently: ‘I cannot play Sister Bountiful to the Community while my own electorate are being asked to forgo improvements in the field of health, education, welfare and the rest.’43 In the House of Commons, pressed both by Labour and by anti-Market Tories, she talked up what she hoped to achieve at Dublin. What she wanted was ‘a broad balance between what we put in and what we get out’.44fact she was offered a refund of just £350 million for the current year. Instead of taking it as a starting point for bargaining, she rejected it with contempt as ‘a third of a loaf’. Roy Jenkins had a ringside view of what followed. ‘She kept us all round the dinner table for four interminable hours,’ he wrote in his diary,45 ‘for the greater part of which,’ he later recalled, she talked without pause, but not without repetition.46 ‘It was obvious to everyone except her that she wasn’t making progress and was alienating people.’infuriated her was that no one bothered to argue with her. Giscard ostentatiously read a newspaper, while Schmidt pretended to go to sleep. This was perhaps inexcusable, though they for their part felt provoked by her aggressive insensitivity. But it was not only the big players that she antagonised. For good measure she gratuitously ‘upbraided… the little countries for their pusillanimous attitude’ to nuclear weapons.47 There was only one flash of light relief. In the middle of a tirade about ‘my oil’ and ‘my fish’, she exclaimed ‘My God’, at which someone audibly interjected, ‘Oh, not that too!’48next morning she continued ‘banging away’ at the same points, still getting nowhere, before Jenkins and Carrington took her aside and persuaded her to agree to a postponement on the basis – ‘the words coming out of her with almost physical difficulty’ – ‘that she would approach the next meeting at Luxembourg in April in a spirit of genuine compromise’.49in the Commons she was constantly under pressure from both Labour and Tory anti-Europeans to leave the Community altogether. But that was an option she refused to countenance. She certainly felt no emotional or visionary commitment to the idea of Europe; and the more she saw of its institutions in practice, the less respect she felt for them. She regarded it as an organisation founded upon compromise and horse-trading, which she despised. Nevertheless she still accepted without question, as she had done since Macmillan’s first application in 1961, that Britain’s place was in the Community. When pressed, however, she always tended to justify membership in the context of her overriding preoccupation with defence. In his first conversation with her after the election Roy Jenkins was disconcerted to find her ‘thinking always a little too much in terms of the EEC and NATO as two bodies which ought to be amalgamated’.50 Nine months later she was happy to agree with a friendly questioner in the Commons that ‘Europe needs to be united, and to stay united as a free Europe against the unfree part of Europe which is bound by bonds of steel around the Soviet Union’.51 The Cold War set the framework of her thinking.this basis she started out moderately pro-European. In her speech to the Tory Party Conference just before Dublin she promised to fight Britain’s corner as a committed member of the Community, asserting that it was ‘no good joining anything half-heartedly’.52 She was happy to acknowledge that there were lessons Britain could profitably learn from Europe: ‘If we want a German and French standard of living we must have a German and French standard of work.’53 Or again: ‘There are many Continental practices that one would like to assume in this country, including the Continentals’ tendency not to spend money that they have not got.’54 But the budget dispute quickly brought out her instinctive underlying hostility to Europe and an unpleasant streak of contempt for the Europeans. ‘They are all a rotten lot,’ she told Roy Jenkins just before Dublin, couching her scorn as usual in terms of defence. ‘Schmidt and the Americans and we are the only ones who would do any standing up and fighting if necessary.’55 Her belief in the essential superiority of the British was founded on two ideas. First, her memory of the war, when most of continental Europe had been overrun and occupied and had to be liberated by Britain (and the Americans). ‘We,’ she once exclaimed, ‘who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free when otherwise it would have been in chains…’56 The idea that the Europeans were not permanently grateful to Britain – as she was to the Americans – never ceased to offend her. Second, she contrived to believe that the sense of justice was an essentially British (or, more specifically, English) characteristic which foreigners did not understand. ‘There’s not a strand of equity or fairness in Europe,’ she declared in her television memoirs. ‘They’re out to get as much as they can, that’s one of those enormous differences.’57next European Council met in Luxembourg in April 1980. This time Britain was offered a rebate of £700 million a year, roughly two-thirds of the disputed loaf, which Jenkins regarded as ‘a very favourable offer’. ‘To almost universal amazement’, however, Mrs Thatcher again rejected it.58 She was ‘much quieter, less strident, less abrasive than at Dublin’, but still adamant. When Jenkins told her she was making a great mistake, ‘she good-humouredly but firmly said “Don’t try persuading me, you know I find persuasion very counterproductive.”’59 The French Commissioner, Claude Cheysson, sensed that Mrs Thatcher positively relished her isolation. ‘Not only didn’t she mind about it,’ he recalled, ‘but she was pleased with that. She was very anxious that Britain would be Britain, and Britain needed no ally. Britain could stand on its own.’60 Long before the Falklands she was already striking Churchillian poses.with another impasse at heads of government level, the Commission now dressed up ‘approximately the same deal in somewhat different form’ – still only a two-thirds refund but extended for the next three years – to present to the council of foreign ministers the next month in Brussels. On their own responsibility Carrington and Gilmour accepted this, and thought they had done well. Carrington, in Jenkins’ view, ‘showed himself a more skilful and sensible negotiator than his head of government. He knew when to settle. She did not.’61 The Foreign Secretary and his deputy then flew back to Britain and drove straight to Chequers, feeling pleased with themselves. But if they expected congratulation they were swiftly disillusioned. ‘My immediate reaction,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘was far from favourable.’62 ‘Had we been bailiffs arriving to take possession of the furniture,’ Gilmour wrote, ‘we would probably have been more cordially received. The Prime Minister was like a firework whose fuse had already been lit; we could almost hear the sizzling.’ Without even offering them the drink they were dying for, she bombarded them with ‘an interminable barrage of irrelevance’, accusing them of selling the country down the river, vowing to resign rather than accept it.63 Eventually they escaped back to London, where Gilmour ignored the Prime Minister’s reaction and briefed journalists that they had secured a diplomatic triumph. The next day’s papers duly hailed a great victory for her tough tactics. Temporarily outmanoeuvred, Mrs Thatcher was forced to swallow her objections and accept the deal, consoling herself that if not the end of the matter, it represented ‘huge progress from the position the Government had inherited’.64
‘Her objection,’ Gilmour believed, ‘was to the fact of the agreement, not its terms. That was not because we had succeeded where she had failed. It was because, to her, the grievance was more valuable than its solution.’65 There is no doubt that the dispute was a godsend to her in her first year, providing what she always needed, an external enemy against whom to vent her aggression and prove her mettle. Greedy foreigners trying to get their hands on Britain’s money offered the perfect outlet for patriotic indignation, a priceless distraction as inflation continued to rise and unemployment began to mount alarmingly. The EC budget battle set the style of her premiership and fixed the tabloid image of battling Maggie swinging her handbag and standing up for Britain against the wiles of Brussels. For the moment she was obliged to make the best of the interim settlement Carrington had secured, while still holding out for a permanent solution, which was not finally achieved until the Fontainebleau council of June 1984. Until then the ‘Bloody British Question’, as it was known in Brussels, continued to paralyse all other progress in the Community and poison Britain’s relationship with Europe.won in the end when two new leaders, François Mitterrand in France and Helmut Kohl in Germany, realised that they would get no peace till Mrs Thatcher got what she demanded. But her victory was achieved at a considerable cost. First, however much she claimed to be a full and equal member, her exclusive preoccupation with the budget prevented Britain playing a full role in the development of the Community, thus confirming the dismal pattern of critical semi-detachment already set by Labour. Second, Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic rhetoric, gleefully amplified by the Sun and the Daily Mail, set a tone of popular prejudice, hostile to the Community and all its works, which endured long after the budget problem was resolved. Third, the ultimate success of her uncompromising campaign encouraged Mrs Thatcher’s conviction that intransigence was the only language foreigners understood. ‘The outcome,’ Nigel Lawson observed, ‘persuaded her that it always paid to be bloody-minded in dealings with the Community. This was to prove increasingly counterproductive in practice.’66this way she began to undermine the Tory commitment to Europe which she had inherited from Macmillan and Heath, leading within ten years to a deep split in the party which would eventually destroy her and bedevil the life of her successors.As Roy Jenkins wrote, ‘It was a heavy price to pay for 400 million ecus.’67into Zimbabwelong-running problem of ending colonial rule in Rhodesia, by contrast, was a subject on which Mrs Thatcher, very soon after taking office, dramatically changed her mind and modified her initial instinct, leading to a settlement which reflected her flexibility and pragmatism. Unlike Europe or the Cold War, Rhodesia was not an issue with which she felt any visceral involvement. Her sympathies were instinctively with the white settlers – ‘our kith and kin’, as the British press liked to call them. Denis had business connections with Rhodesia, and she could not forget that Ian Smith, the rebel Prime Minister, had served in the RAF during the war. The African leaders, by contrast, she regarded as Communist-sponsored terrorists. Nevertheless Rhodesia was marginal to her central concerns, a tiresome responsibility which she simply wanted to dispose of honourably.years after Smith’s illegal declaration of independence from Britain, it was the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Angola and Mozambique in 1975 which spelled the end of the line for rebel Rhodesia. As the two rival African guerrilla groups, ZIPRA and ZANU, led by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, stepped up their military incursions from neighbouring Zambia and Mozambique, South Africa decided it could no longer go on shoring up its northern satellite and began to put pressure on Smith to bow to the inevitable and accept majority rule. In 1977 Smith rejected an Anglo-American peace plan put forward by David Owen and the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and negotiated his own internal settlement – heavily favourable to the whites – with the more accommodating Bishop Abel Muzorewa. Callaghan and Owen – and Carter – immediately declared it unacceptable and refused to recognise it.Thatcher’s instinct was to support the Smith/Muzorewa settlement, and this remained her position up to the General Election. In April she sent the former Colonial Secretary Lord Boyd to observe the Rhodesian elections for the Tory party. Bishop Muzorewa won and duly became the country’s first black Prime Minister at the head of a power-sharing government. But with Nkomo and Mugabe (now allied as the Patriotic Front) boycotting the elections, most international opinion declared them meaningless. Boyd, however, declared them fair and valid, and Mrs Thatcher accepted his report. In her first speech in the Commons as Prime Minister she warmly welcomed the elections as marking a ‘major change’ and promised to build on them.68 Six weeks later, stopping off in Canberra on her way back from the Tokyo summit at the end of June, she again hinted that Britain would recognise Muzorewa, provoking a storm of protest led by the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who warned her that she was isolating herself from the rest of the Commonwealth, and indeed the world. President Carter had already rejected the result of the elections and announced – in defiance of Congress, which voted to lift them – that American sanctions against Rhodesia would be maintained.her return to Britain, Carrington persuaded her to change her mind. Recognition of Muzorewa, he argued, would not only split both the Commonwealth and the Atlantic alliance, boost Soviet influence in Africa and damage Britain economically; it was also futile, since the internal settlement would not end the war in Rhodesia, but only widen it, with the Soviet Union backing Nkomo and China backing Mugabe. Britain would be left holding nominal responsibility before the United Nations for an escalating conflict. As Lady Thatcher subsequently wrote in her memoirs: ‘Unpleasant realities had to be faced… He turned out to be right.’69also found other grounds to change her mind. She was persuaded that there were legal flaws in Smith’s gerrymandered constitution, which was unlike any other that Britain had bequeathed her former colonies. Strict regard for legality was something Mrs Thatcher always took very seriously. In addition, following the failure of the Vance – Owen initiative, she liked the idea of Britain going it alone to achieve a settlement without American help. ‘How do we decolonise a colony when there is no problem at all?’ she asked her advisers. ‘We get all the parties round a table at Lancaster House,’ they replied. ‘They work out a constitution that suits them all; then they have an election on that constitution and that’s goodbye.’ Very well, she concluded, ‘Let’s go down that road and see what happens.’70all these reasons – though not without a last-minute wobble when she appeared to go cold on the whole idea – Mrs Thatcher had made up her mind before she flew to Lusaka for the Commonwealth Conference in August that the only solution lay in a comprehensive settlement involving all the parties. She actually signalled her shift of view in the House of Commons on 25 July, when the Foreign Office succeeded in writing into her speech a carefully phrased statement that any settlement must be internationally recognised. But scarcely anyone noticed the significance of her words: it is not certain that she fully recognised it herself.71 Carrington insists that she had determined what she wanted to achieve before she went to Lusaka. But it was still generally assumed that she would be walking into a lions’ den, setting herself against the united view of the rest of the Commonwealth. She was certainly prepared for a hostile reception.Denis had travelled extensively in Africa, Mrs Thatcher had no connection with either the old or the new Commonwealth; nor – unlike Callaghan orWilson – did she feel any political sympathy with Africa’s liberation struggle. On the contrary, like Ted Heath, she found the hypocrisy of the African leaders preaching democracy for others while operating one-party states themselves, reviling Britain one moment while demanding increased aid the next, very hard to swallow.Yet she did not want to see the club break up; and in practice, once exposed to them privately in the relaxed atmosphere of a Commonwealth Conference, she discovered most of the African leaders to be much more agreeable and a good deal less ‘Marxist’ than she had expected.72 In particular, as Carrington noted, she ‘blossomed in the warmth of Kenneth Kaunda’s friendly personality’. 73 At Lusaka she even scored a memorable diplomatic coup by dancing with him: since her Oxford days she had been an excellent dancer, and the resulting photographs did more than any diplomatic communiqué to dissolve tensions.of the credit for the success of Lusaka has been given to the Queen for helping to create the family atmosphere in which Mrs Thatcher and President Kaunda were able to overcome their mutual suspicion.74 But at least as much is due to Mrs Thatcher herself, first for allowing Carrington to change her mind on the central issue and then, having changed it, for her determination to hammer out – with Malcolm Fraser, Michael Manley (of Jamaica) and the Commonwealth Secretary-General Sonny Ramphal – the lines of an agreement which could bring Mugabe and Nkomo to Lancaster House. Carrington paid tribute to the skill with which she exploited the element of surprise at her unexpected reversal. Always concerned to get the legal framework right, she insisted that Rhodesia must first return to its constitutional status as a colony, with the appointment of a new Governor and all the flummery of British rule. In return she agreed that Britain would send troops to enforce and monitor the ceasefire. This was a risk which Callaghan had not been prepared to take. But Mrs Thatcher accepted that Britain had a responsibility to discharge; she was determined not to have the United Nations involved.75 More than anything else it was this guarantee of British military commitment which persuaded the Patriotic Front to lay down its arms. By the concerted pressure of South Africa, the neighbouring ‘Front Line’ states, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States, all parties to the conflict were cajoled into agreeing to attend peace talks in London in September.still had no great hopes of a settlement. But for fifteen weeks he put the whole weight of the Foreign Office into the effort to achieve one, believing that his tenure would not last long if he failed.76 Having played her part at Lusaka, Mrs Thatcher left her Foreign Secretary to chair the talks with minimum interference.While Kaunda flew to London to impress on Nkomo that he must settle, and Samora Machel of Mozambique similarly leaned on Mugabe, Mrs Thatcher’s role behind the scenes was to make plain to the whites that they could not look to Britain to bail them out. The negotiations were tense and protracted – a walkout by one or other party was never far away; but an agreement was eventually signed just before Christmas, providing for elections in the New Year, a ten-year embargo on the transfer of land and British help in forging a united army out of the previously warring forces. Christopher Soames was appointed Governor to oversee the elections and bring the new state of Zimbabwe to independence.Thatcher would frankly have preferred that the Marxist Mugabe had not won the elections. Right up to the last moment, diehard whites still hoped that she would declare the result invalid. But she refused to do so, and firmly quashed any thought that she might recognise a military coup. She was their last hope, and when she spelled out the reality they knew the game was up. Mugabe’s victory was in fact the best possible outcome, since winning power through the ballot box served – at least in the short term – to de-radicalise the Patriotic Front. Once in power, Mugabe quickly declared Zimbabwe a one-party state; but for the best part of twenty years it seemed a relatively successful one. Only at the end of the century did the issue of the unequal ownership of land – shelved at Lancaster House – erupt in Government-sponsored violence against white farmers as the ageing dictator clung to office, wrecking the country’s once-prosperous economy and throwing its multiracial future into doubt.77contrary pulls of patriotic sentiment and geopolitical realism recurred in relation to other remnants of Britain’s imperial past: the Falklands, Grenada and Hong Kong. In the case of Rhodesia, as in Hong Kong, realism prevailed. For fourteen years since 1965 the colony had been a running sore in British politics, the annual vote on the maintenance of sanctions a source of division and embarrassment to the Tory party in particular. All Mrs Thatcher wanted in 1979 was to be honourably rid of it. She was lucky that the circumstances came together to make a solution possible just as she came into office. But she deserves credit for seizing the opportunity, against her initial instinct, and for exerting her influence to secure a tolerable settlement. The outcome gained her a good deal of international credit, not only with black Africa but also in Washington, at a time when the Government’s domestic economic record was already looking bleak. After seven difficult months, the Zimbabwe settlement was her Government’s first unquestionable success.end of the beginningthe time the Zimbabwe settlement was signed at the end of 1979 the Government’s honeymoon, such as it was, was over.The Lancaster House agreement was the one bright spot in an otherwise darkening picture.The novelty of a woman Prime Minister had quickly worn off. Her style was established: brisk, didactic, combative, with a touch of syrup. There was no lingering doubt about her capacity to do the job. She had established her domination of the Cabinet and Government machine, despite the barely concealed scepticism of many of her senior colleagues. By her mastery of detail and clarity of purpose she had asserted her command of the House of Commons despite having to shout over a perpetual hubbub of heckling and interruption.had achieved a notable coup in November by her unprecedentedly full disclosure of the facts surrounding the unmasking of the distinguished art historian Sir Anthony Blunt – the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – as a one-time Soviet spy, the ‘fourth man’ who had tipped off his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, enabling them to escape to the Soviet Union in 1951, and then done the same for Kim Philby in 1963. It was a tricky task for a new Prime Minister to reveal that Blunt’s treachery had been suspected since 1951 and known to the security services since 1964, but covered up by successive Home Secretaries and Attorneys-General in return for a full confession. But she carried it off with considerable aplomb, raising hopes – not to be fulfilled – that she would inaugurate a more open regime where MI5 and MI6 were concerned. Willie Whitelaw was actually working on a new Protection of Information Bill to replace the catch-all provisions of the 1911 Official Secrets Act; but this was abandoned when Andrew Boyle, the journalist who had exposed Blunt, asserted that he could not have done so under the new provisions. It was another ten years before her government returned to the reform of the Official Secrets Act, and then it was to tighten, not loosen, its provisions.Thatcher also won considerable admiration for her response to further Irish atrocities. At the end of August the former Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, and two members of his family were blown up while on holiday in the Irish Republic; and the same day eighteen British soldiers were killed at Warrenpoint in County Down. Mrs Thatcher not only condemned the attacks but paid an unannounced visit to Northern Ireland two days later to demonstrate her defiance of the terrorists and her support for the troops. She visited some of the victims of previous IRA bombs in hospital, went on a courageous walkabout in the centre of Belfast protected by just a handful of flak-jacketed policemen, had lunch with army commanders at Portadown and then flew by helicopter to the republican stronghold of Crossmaglen, where she ‘enthusiastically donned a combat jacket and a beret of the Ulster Defence Regiment’.78 This ‘nation-rallying trip,’ The Times wrote at the end of the year, ‘was a stroke of genius’.79 She repeated it just before Christmas and made a point of going at least once a year over the next decade.enjoyed a rapturous victory conference at Blackpool in October, at which she thanked her party for keeping faith during the years of opposition and boldly looked forward to ‘the far longer years of Conservative government that are to come’.80 In this and other speeches Mrs Thatcher repeated the Government’s determination to tackle the four linked problems of inflation, public spending, taxation and industrial relations. But by the end of 1979, as the commentators looked back on the Government’s first six months, it seemed that in every one of those areas its first actions had only made a bad situation worse. On the credit side, opinion polls still showed overwhelming public support for action to curb the unions, and the Government was further heartened by votes against strike action by the miners and the British Leyland car workers.Yet despite lurching hard to the left since losing office, Labour was once again ahead in the polls. Even those who wished the Government well were holding their breath. Fred Emery, political editor of The Times, wrote that the dominant reaction to the Prime Minister’s first six months was one of awe for the ‘marvellous flair’ of ‘this unflinching woman’ who had swept her doubtful party into ‘a high-risk policy gamble’. ‘The awe reflects Mrs Thatcher’s private and public dominance, making our system more presidential than ever.’ But many wondered ‘whether Mrs Thatcher has quite grasped yet how bad the economy could be’.81Government was sailing into stormy waters.
Дата добавления: 2015-11-04; просмотров: 24 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |