‘I do not think we are out of step,’ she declared at her post-summit press conference. ‘I think steadily others are coming in step with us.’38 Alternatively she persuaded herself that it was actually good to be isolated, that in being isolated she was actually leading Europe. ‘Sometimes you have to be isolated to give a lead.’39 But this was self-delusion. She had a legitimate alternative vision of Europe. But right or wrong she was the worst possible advocate for her vision. Her ceaselessly confrontational style became – in the view of her long-suffering colleagues who had to try to pick up the pieces after her barnstorming performances – ‘counterproductive’. 40 ‘It wears out a bit,’ Douglas Hurd recalled. ‘I think that quite a lot of her colleagues began to regard it as theatre.’41truth is that Mrs Thatcher’s European policy was no policy at all. It reflected, but also greatly exacerbated, instinctive British suspicion of the Continent. It pointed up real difficulties – of sovereignty, of democratic accountability, of economic divergence – in the way of ‘ever-closer union’ of the Community. There was a case for proceeding one step at a time, just as there was – and still is – a case for preferring a community of independent nations to a superstate. But by continually saying ‘no’ Britain only lost influence on a process from which it was in the end unable to stand aside, thus repeating the dismal game of catch-up which it had been playing at every stage of Europe’s development since 1950. Europe was the greatest challenge facing Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. It was also the greatest failure of her premiership. And it was a failure directly attributable to her own confrontational, xenophobic and narrow-minded personality.
the Worldexport of Thatcherismthe mid-1980s Thatcherism had become an international phenomenon. Partly just because she was a woman, which meant that in all the photographs of international gatherings she stood out, in blue or red or green, from the grey-suited men around her (and was always placed chivalrously in the middle); partly on account of the strident clarity of her personality, her tireless travelling and her evangelical compulsion to trumpet her beliefs wherever she went; partly as a result of Britain’s unlikely victory in the Falklands war; partly in recognition of her close relationship with Ronald Reagan and her intermediary role between the Americans and Mikhail Gorbachev – for all these reasons Margaret Thatcher had become by about 1985 one of the best-known leaders on the planet, a superstar on the world stage, an object of curiosity and admiration wherever she went and far more popular around the world than she ever was at home.all she was the most articulate and charismatic champion of a wave of economic liberalisation which was sweeping the world, turning back the dominant collectivism of the past half-century. She did not, of course, originate it. The anti-socialist and anti-corporatist counter-revolution was a global phenomenon observable literally from China to Peru. It originated, if anywhere, in Chicago, where both Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had been at different times professors. The turning of the intellectual tide was reflected before Mrs Thatcher even became Tory leader by both of them being awarded the Nobel prize for economics – Hayek in 1974, Friedman in 1976. It was in Chile that their heretical ideas were first determinedly put into practice when General Augusto Pinochet, having overthrown (with American help) the democratically elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, brought in the so-called ‘Chicago boys’ to instigate an extreme experiment in free-market reform enforced by the methods of a police state. The politics were detestable, but the economics set a model for the rest of South America and beyond.the early days of her leadership Mrs Thatcher knew that she was riding, or hoped to ride, a global wave. ‘Across the Western world the tide is turning’, she declared in March 1979, just before the General Election which brought her in to power, ‘and soon the same thing will happen here.’1 The idea that she was the pathfinder only seized her some years later. ‘In 1981,’ she recalled, ‘a finance minister came to see me. “We’re all very interested in what you’re doing,” he said, “because if you succeed, others will follow.” That had never occurred to me.’2 By 1986, however, she had begun to glory in the claim that Britain had led the world.the British example – particularly privatisation – played a part. But equally obviously the counter-revolution had its own momentum, in both East and West, as one social democratic country after another ran into the same sort of problems that Britain had encountered in the 1970s and responded in more or less the same way. Over the next decade the same necessity imposed itself right across Europe. In the fifteen years from 1985 over $100 billion worth of state assets were sold off, including such flagship national companies as Renault, Volkswagen, Lufthansa, Elf and the Italian oil company ENI, adding up to ‘the greatest sale in the history of the world’.3all the free-market contagion spread to the citadels of Communism itself – to China as early as 1981 (where the experiment of economic liberalisation remained under strict political control) and then to the Soviet Union in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika programme, whose inherent contradictions rapidly precipitated the collapse of the whole Communist system. Mrs Thatcher was entitled to celebrate the triumph of ideas which she had not only followed but proselytised with missionary fervour. But the very fact that the phenomenon has been virtually universal – so that, as Mrs Thatcher herself noted, not just conservative but even nominally socialist governments were equally forced to conform to the global Zeitgeist – is the proof that it had its own irresistible momentum, irrespective of her contribution, significant though that was.collapse of Communism and the ‘problem’ of Germanythe sudden and quite unexpected collapse of Communism in the autumn of 1989 was a triumphant vindication of all that Mrs Thatcher had stood for and striven to bring about since 1975. Whether you call it Thatcherism or some other name, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of the Soviet empire and the disintegration within two years of the Soviet Union itself represented the ultimate victory for her philosophy and her – and Ronald Reagan’s – military strategy. The overriding context of all her politics for forty years had been the Cold War; and now suddenly the West had won it.her memoirs she gave the principal credit to Reagan ‘whose policies of military and economic competition with the Soviet Union forced the Soviet leaders… to abandon their ambitions of hegemony and to embark on the process of reform which in the end brought the entire Communist system crashing down’. But since the actual collapse had occurred after Reagan’s time she felt obliged to extend the credit to his successor, George Bush, who ‘managed the dangerous and volatile transformation with great diplomatic skill’; and even, through gritted teeth, to some of the other European allies, ‘who resisted both Soviet pressure and Soviet blandishments to maintain a strong western defence – in particular Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and… but modesty forbids’.4 This was false modesty, however. As the President’s staunchest ally she had no doubt who deserved most credit, after Reagan himself, for the success of their joint strategy. In retirement she had no doubt that this was her greatest achievement.the implosion of Communism did not bring her unmixed joy. On the contrary, her last year in office was one of her most difficult on the international front. For the immediate consequence of the opening of the Berlin Wall was an irresistible momentum to reunite the two parts of Germany, a prospect which exacerbated her fear and loathing of the former enemy. At the same time she was having to come to terms with a new administration in Washington in which she had much less confidence than she had in Ronald Reagan. At her moment of ideological victory, therefore, she found herself more isolated on the world stage than ever before.was relieved when Vice-President George Bush trounced the Democrat Michael Dukakis in November 1988 to ensure continuity of Republican rule. But she would never have the same rapport with Bush that she had with Reagan. She was now the senior partner, but Bush, unsurprisingly, had no wish to be patronised. Guided by a new team of advisers – James Baker as Secretary of State, Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense, Brent Scowcroft as National Security Adviser – he determined to make his own alliances. In particular, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush had identified Helmut Kohl as the European leader with whom he should forge a special relationship. With Mrs Thatcher it was necessary for him to show that he was his own man.’s relations with his European allies are fully documented in A World Transformed, his remarkably candid joint memoir written with Brent Scowcroft, which reprints a lot of documents, transcripts of telephone conversations and diary accounts of the intense diplomacy accompanying the end of the Cold War – far more than has yet received security clearance at the Bush Library in Texas.[o] From this there emerges a vivid picture of the tensions between the leading players and the extent of Mrs Thatcher’s isolation as Bush and Kohl, with much less objection than she hoped for from Mitterrand and Gorbachev, rushed to consummate the reunion of the two Germanies far faster than she thought wise or desirable.before the heady events of November, however, from the very beginning of Bush’s presidency she was afraid that Washington was going soft on nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev was trying to split NATO by offering cuts to prevent the alliance modernising its short-range nuclear forces (SNF). Kohl, under domestic pressure from the Social Democrats and Greens, wanted to delay modernisation and reduce the number of missiles immediately. By contrast, Scowcroft wrote, ‘Thatcher was unyielding on any changes that might weaken NATO defences.’5 She wanted the Americans to let her handle Kohl, which they were unwilling to do – partly because ‘Margaret… was even more unyielding than we, and far more emotional about the dangers of compromise’, but also because Bush was not willing to play second fiddle to her.was very annoyed when Kohl’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, tried to ‘bounce’ the alliance into SNF cuts by announcing them in the Bundestag before they had been agreed. She gave Bush her views in a telephone conversation which he described as ‘vintage Thatcher’: ‘We must be firm with Germany… There could be no question, no question, she repeated, of negotiations on SNF.’6the Americans did change their position on SNF negotiations. Mrs Thatcher, Scowcroft recalled, was ‘not happy… particularly since we had not consulted with her beforehand’:truth of the matter was that we knew what Thatcher’s reaction would be… We believed we had to make this gesture to the Germans… and, had we consulted the British, it would have been very awkward to proceed over their strong objections.7the May 1989 NATO summit in Brussels she was still ‘unhappy and apprehensive’ about the American proposal for immediate cuts in conventional forces, linked to SNF negotiations; but at the end of the day she knew the limits of her influence. She told the envoys who came to brief her in London, ‘If the President wants it, of course we will do it.’8 Yet even as they sat down to dinner in Brussels she buttonholed Bush. ‘We must not give in on this,’ she told him. ‘You’re not going to give in, are you?’ In the end James Baker and the Foreign Ministers – still Howe for Britain – found a form of words she could accept. ‘Our strategy of using our conventional forces proposal to encourage a deal over the nuclear forces problem worked,’ Bush wrote.The next morning, to his relief, ‘Margaret waxed enthusiastic. I suspect she did not want to be separated from the United States.’9 But while the Americans congratulated themselves on ‘a resounding success’, the press had no doubt that Mrs Thatcher had suffered a humiliating defeat.10next day Bush went on to Germany and delivered a speech at Mainz in which he referred to West Germany and the United States as ‘partners in leadership’. Mrs Thatcher took this as a snub to her special relationship with Washington. ‘In truth she need not have worried,’ Scowcroft wrote. ‘The expression had no exclusionary intent and was meant only for flourish and encouragement.’11 Nevertheless it was widely interpreted as reflecting a real and important shift in transatlantic relationships. Bush tried to make up by describing Britain as America’s ‘anchor to windward’. ‘This was kindly meant, but not exactly reassuring,’ Percy Cradock commented.‘The anchor to windward is a lonely position and not the one we had imagined we occupied.’12least one special relationship did persist, however, between Scowcroft and Charles Powell, whom Scowcroft regarded as ‘my opposite in the British Government’. Secure lines were installed so that the National Security Adviser could speak directly to his counterparts in London, Paris and Bonn. ‘All either one of us had to do was to push a button and lift the receiver to have the phone ring on the other’s desk… We soon learned how to explore in a comfortable, offhand manner the limits of the flexibility we felt our principals would have on various issues.’ Scowcroft felt that by this time Powell was ‘the only serious influence on Thatcher’s views on foreign policy’.13Thatcher naturally watched the dominoes come down across Eastern Europe with unrestrained delight, as first Poland and Hungary moved towards democracy without provoking Soviet intervention; then the Hungarians allowed refugees from East Germany to cross into Austria; and finally the East German authorities themselves opened the Berlin Wall on 9 November and the population emerged like the prisoners in Fidelio to tear it down with pickaxes, crowbars and their bare hands and dance exultantly on the ruins. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania followed before the end of the year as the so-called ‘velvet revolution’ brought the dissident playwright Václav Havel to power in Prague, while President Ceauşescu and his monstrous wife were summarily executed in Bucharest on Christmas Day. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But Mrs Thatcher, mindful of the excesses of the French Revolution 200 years before, was already wary of things getting out of hand. Back in 1982 she had predicted that the Wall would fall one day:day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles… One day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.she admitted she had not expected it so soon.When it happened, she told reporters in Downing Street that she had watched the television pictures with the same enthusiasm as everyone else and celebrated ‘a great day for liberty’. But even at that moment she was quick to stamp on questions about German reunification. ‘I think you are going much too fast, much too fast,’ she warned. ‘You have to take these things step by step and handle them very wisely.’14 But she quickly found that the impetus of events was too strong for her.had three admissible reasons for resisting the prospect of a united Germany. First, she was afraid that its sheer economic strength would upset the balance of the European Community. Second, she was afraid that a neutral or demilitarised Germany would leave a gaping hole in NATO’s defences against a still-nuclear Soviet Union.Third, she feared that the loss of East Germany (and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact generally) might destroy Gorbachev and thus jeopardise the biggest prize of all, democracy in the USSR. All these were rational arguments for caution. But they were underpinned in Mrs Thatcher’s mind by another, inadmissible reason – her virulent and unappeased loathing of the wartime enemy.is no easy explanation of why Margaret Thatcher found it so much harder than others of her generation to forget the war. Certainly it dominated her adolescence from the age of fourteen to twenty – her last four years at school, her first two at university – but she was not alone in that. Grantham suffered fairly heavy German bombing – probably heavier than anywhere outside London except for Coventry and Plymouth; also from 1941 Lincolnshire was full of US airbases and US airmen, which sharpened her awareness of the Americans’ role in saving Europe from itself. She had heard first-hand testimony of the nature of the Nazi regime from the young Jewish refugee whom her parents briefly had to stay before the war; later she had a large Jewish community in her Finchley constituency. But all this pales in comparison with the experience of her male contemporaries who actually fought in France, Belgium, North Africa and Italy, let alone those who liberated the concentration camps, almost all of whom – certainly the future politicians among them – seem to have come back determined to rebuild the continent, ready to forget the war and move on. She had suffered no personal loss of family or close friends to explain her enduring bitterness. Yet forty years later she was still consumed by an ‘atavistic fear of Germany and [a] suspicion of the German people qua people’.15soon as the Wall came down in November 1989 she knew that Kohl would lose no time in pressing for reunification of the two Germanies; but she believed that the four wartime allies, if they were resolute, could still prevent it, or at least delay it for ten or fifteen years. Unification was not a matter for the Germans alone, she insisted, but affected NATO, the EC, the Russians and the whole balance of power in Europe. She even tried to argue that the Helsinki Agreement precluded any alteration of borders. In Paris she hoped to form an Anglo-French axis to contain Germany, but found Mitterrand unhelpful. A week later she flew to Camp David to share her fears with the President directly. ‘She particularly worried that talk of reunification or changing borders would only frighten the Soviets,’ Bush recorded:
‘The overriding objective is to get democracy throughout Eastern Europe,’ she told me. ‘We have won the battle of ideas after tough times as we kept NATO strong’… She added that such change could take place only in an environment of stability.16
‘The atmosphere,’ Mrs Thatcher acknowledged, ‘did not improve as a result of our discussions.’17 In fact, Brent Scowcroft felt ‘some lingering sympathy for Thatcher’s position’, believing that she ‘had her eyes on some very important priorities’.18 But from the moment Kohl had telephoned him to describe the ‘festival atmosphere [like] an enormous fair’ as the Wall came down, the President was firmly on Kohl’s side.19 ‘We don’t fear the ghosts of the past,’ he assured the Chancellor. ‘Margaret does.’20 For his part Kohl was exasperated by Mrs Thatcher’s obstruction. ‘I think it is a great mistake on Maggie’s part to think this is a time for caution,’ he complained.21 Her ideas were ‘simply pre-Churchill. She thinks the post-war era has not come to an end. She thinks history is not just. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won a war but lost an empire, and their economy. She does the wrong thing. She should try to bind the Germans into the EC.’still professed to see reunification as a long process over several years, with West Germany meanwhile remaining in NATO and the GDR in the Warsaw Pact – as Mrs Thatcher wanted.22 Bush suspected that Kohl really hoped for unification much sooner than this, but did not want to prejudice it by seeming to press too fast. Nevertheless he was happy to give Kohl ‘a green light. I don’t think I ever cautioned him about going too fast.’ In his relaxed view ‘self-determination was the key, and no one could object to it’.23Scowcroft still shared Mrs Thatcher’s worry about Gorbachev’s response. ‘It was still possible that the Soviets would conclude that a united Germany was intolerable and oppose it, by force if necessary. Or they would successfully impose conditions on it taking place which would render it unacceptable to us.’24 The difference was that while the Americans, determined that the new Germany should be a member of NATO, were working to overcome Soviet opposition, Mrs Thatcher was trying to deploy Gorbachev’s objections as a brake. From their private conversations she believed that Mitterrand also shared her alarm and hoped that he would join with her to slow the process down; but whatever he may have said in private, Mitterrand was realistic. He had no intention of opposing the cherished project of his friend Helmut Kohl, but still put the preservation of the Franco-German axis before her idea of a Franco-British one. ‘He made the wrong decision for France,’ she asserted in her memoirs.25diplomatic method eventually agreed was the ‘Two-plus-Four’ process, whereby the two Germanies negotiated the domestic details of unification in an international context approved by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. This met Mrs Thatcher’s wish to involve the Russians, despite American fear that it would give them a chance to be obstructive. But Bush gambled that Gorbachev could be won over, and he was right.Thatcher’s other concern was that premature euphoria about the end of the Cold War would lead to reductions in defence spending. When she met Bush at Camp David – just before he was due to meet Gorbachev in Malta for the latest round of arms-limitation talks – she was adamant that he should give nothing away. ‘We had a good visit,’ Bush wrote, ‘but she did not want to see any defense cuts at all of any kind.’ Once again, however, she recognised the limits of her influence. ‘In the end… Margaret sent me a nice telegram pledging her full support in very comforting words.’26the NATO summit in Brussels in December she was very unhappy about American proposals for cutting conventional forces in Europe, fearing that the Russians would simply pull their forces back beyond the Urals, from where they could easily sweep west again at a moment’s notice. Despite Kohl’s repeated assurances that neutralisation was out of the question, he was under strong domestic pressure to reduce the number of allied troops and NATO missiles on German soil; she was afraid that Gorbachev might exploit this weakness to make neutralisation his condition for accepting unification. In the end, however, Scowcroft noted, ‘it became apparent that, while not happy, she would acquiesce in what we wished to do’.27February 1990 she accepted that she was losing the battle, but was still anxious to save Gorbachev’s face. ‘I fear that Gorbachev will feel isolated if all the reunification process goes the West’s way,’ she told Bush by telephone. ‘He’s lost the Warsaw Pact to democratic governments.’ Then Bush’s account went on:’s fears of a united Germany, however, came ringing through. She darkly perceived that Germany would be ‘the Japan of Europe, but worse than Japan. Japan is an offshore power with enormous trade surpluses. Germany is in the heart of a continent of countries most of which she has attacked and occupied. Germany has colossal wealth and trade surpluses. So we must include a bigger country, the Soviet Union [or] you, in the political area.’
‘It was not enough to anchor Germany in the EC,’ she believed. ‘That might become Germany’s new empire: the future empires will be economic empires.’28 On this occasion Scowcroft found her arguments becoming more sophisticated and her tone ‘much improved’, but still found her fears ‘worrying’.29 He was ‘dismayed’ that her anxiety not to upset Gorbachev led her to back a ‘demilitarised East Germany’, outside NATO, instead of a united Germany in NATO as the Americans wanted. Meeting Bush in Bermuda in April, she still argued that ‘we should allow Soviet troops to remain for a transitional period – it would help Gorbachev with his military’. ‘I don’t agree,’ Bush replied, ‘I want the Soviets to go home.’30fact she had already accepted the inevitable at the end of March when Kohl came to Britain. Heaping insincere encomiums on the Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher formally gave her blessing to the new Germany, so long as it was in NATO and retained ‘sizeable’ British, French and American forces, including short-range nuclear weapons, on its soil.acceptance was made easier by the results of the first free elections held in the old GDR. One of her arguments for delay had been that the East had lived under authoritarian rule for so long – first under the Nazis, then under Communism – that it could not be expected to adapt quickly to democracy. In fact the voters confounded her by voting heavily for Kohl’s CDU, giving a clear endorsement both to his policy of rapid unification and to broadly free-market economic policies (the former Communists won only 16 per cent) and allaying her fears of neutralism. Visiting Moscow in June, Mrs Thatcher played her part in helping to secure Gorbachev’s acquiescence that the reunited Germany could join NATO – in return for badly needed Western credits to shore up the Soviet economy. In July Gorbachev survived a last-ditch challenge from his own hardliners; and Kohl flew to Moscow to receive the Soviet blessing in person. The new Germany came into being on 3 October 1990, less than eleven months after the opening of the Wall.with Germany locked into NATO she still worried that facile talk of a ‘peace dividend’ from the ending of the Cold War would lead to a short-sighted lowering of the West’s nuclear guard. Washington was pressing for an early NATO summit, eventually held in London in July, to bring forward cuts in both nuclear and conventional forces in Europe. To her dismay Mrs Thatcher found herself once again ‘at odds with the Americans’. As Bush relates, she still objected to weakening nuclear deterrence by diluting the doctrine of flexible response:argued that we were abandoning the fundamentals of solid military strategy for the sake of ‘eye-catching propositions’… She saw the move to declare nuclear weapons ‘weapons of last resort’ as undermining our short-range forces and as slipping us to a position of ‘no first use of nuclear weapons’, leaving our conventional forces vulnerable… She demanded an entirely new draft.31again, however, Mrs Thatcher had to swallow her objections and accept ‘a compromise text close to the original draft’. Flexible response was modified and the Alliance declared that it was ‘moving away’ from forward defence. At her insistence the words ‘weapons of last resort’ were stiffened with an assertion that there were ‘no circumstances in which nuclear retaliation in response to military action might be discounted’. Mrs Thatcher was still not happy with ‘this unwieldy compromise’.32 But she had no veto in NATO as she had in Europe, so she had to accept it. ‘It was a landmark shift,’ Bush wrote. ‘It offered the Soviets firm evidence of the West’s genuine desire to change NATO. Our offer was on the table.’33final act of the Cold War was also, suitably enough, the final act of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. In November 1990, as the votes were being cast in London which forced her resignation, she was in Paris attending a meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), at which she committed Britain to substantial cuts in the stationing of conventional forces in Germany. In reality it was a largely ceremonial occasion, with congratulatory speeches celebrating the victory of freedom over tyranny and resolution over coexistence. But it was the triumph of everything Mrs Thatcher had been fighting for all her political life.environment and global warmingmajor new issue appeared on the political agenda in the late 1980s – and Margaret Thatcher, with all her other domestic and international concerns, deserves much of the credit for putting it there. Since the 1970s ‘the environment’ had been the fashionable term for a ragbag of relatively minor problems to do with planning and land use. Around 1988, however, environmental concerns suddenly acquired a new dimension with the discovery of global warming, caused – probably – by the build-up in the earth’s atmosphere of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’: carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. From parochial questions of road building and waste disposal which were normally beneath a Prime Minister’s notice, the environment assumed, almost overnight, the status of an international challenge which transcended even the Cold War.the early years of her premiership Mrs Thatcher had not taken environmental concerns very seriously. As a combative Tory politician she saw environmental campaigners, particularly Greenpeace, as just another branch of CND, a mix of sincere but naive sentimentalists. She insisted that socialism, inherently inefficient and unaccountable, was the great polluter, whereas free enterprise was both more efficient and better able to spend resources on environmental protection. Indeed, she suggested in 1988, cleaning up pollution was ‘almost a function of prosperity, because it is the East European block, their chemical factories, that have been pouring stuff into the Rhine’.34also believed that coal and other fossil fuels beloved of the left were intrinsically dirty, whereas nuclear energy was clean and safe. Those who campaigned against nuclear power on environmental grounds were simply wrong, like those who imagined they were promoting peace by opposing nuclear weapons. She saw it as her business to cut through this sort of emotive nonsense to deal with the facts. Proud of her credentials as a scientist in a world of arts-educated generalists, she believed that she understood the scientific arguments. She believed that scientific problems would be solved by the further development of science, not by regulation.project she had always backed, even before the Falklands gave her a special interest in the region – was the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). It therefore gave her great patriotic satisfaction that it was the scientists of the BAS who in 1985 discovered a large hole in the earth’s ozone layer, nearly as large as the United States and growing. International efforts had already been under way for some time to limit the emission of halogen gases, principally chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays: a UN-sponsored conference in Montreal in 1987 set a target of halving the use of CFCs in ten years. But the fact that the hole in the ozone layer was a British discovery undoubtedly helped persuade Mrs Thatcher to throw her weight into efforts to remedy it. She was also greatly influenced by Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 1987 to 1990, Sir Crispin Tickell, a career diplomat who happened to be a serious amateur meteorologist. It was Tickell who brought the urgency of the problem to Mrs Thatcher’s attention and persuaded her to make it the subject of a major speech, which he then helped her to write.decade later her speech to the Royal Society in September 1988 was remembered as ‘a true epiphany, the blinding discovery of a conviction politician, which overnight turned the environment from being a minority to a mainstream concern in Britain’.35 At the time it made rather less impact. Most of it was a standard affirmation of the Government’s commitment to science; only towards the end did she turn to the three recently observed phenomena of greenhouse gases, the hole in the ozone layer, and acid rain. She stressed the need for more research, as well as immediate steps to cut emissions, and emphasised how much money the Government was already spending on cleaning Britain’s rivers.36March 1989 Mrs Thatcher chaired a three-day conference in London on Saving the Ozone Layer, attended by 123 nations, which strengthened the Montreal protocol by setting a new target of ending CFC emissions entirely by the end of the century: she spoke at both the beginning and the end. Within Whitehall and the EC she chased progress vigorously on the tightening of anti-pollution regulations, backing the DoE against the Treasury and other departments which raised the sort of objections on grounds of cost that she herself used to make a few years earlier.37 In August she told President Bush of ‘her intention to overhaul Britain’s environmental legislation’ – clearly trying to encourage him to do the same;38 and in November she made a major speech to the UN General Assembly in which she announced the establishment of a new climate research centre in Britain and called for ‘a vast international co-operative effort’ to save the global environment.39this was before the final report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in June 1990. This – the unanimous conclusion of 300 international scientists – warned that if no action were taken to curb the emission of greenhouse gases, average global temperatures would rise by anything between 1.4 and 2.8 per cent by 2030, causing sea levels to rise with disastrous consequences for low-lying areas such as Bangladesh, Holland and East Anglia. (Mrs Thatcher was particularly fond of pointing out that one Commonwealth country, the Maldive Islands, with a population of 177,000, would disappear entirely.)40 This was the first authoritative international confirmation that global warming was really happening, though the evidence was already visible in severe drought leading to famine in Sudan, Ethiopia and much of central Africa. But Mrs Thatcher, encouraged by Crispin Tickell, had already anticipated its recommendations. Opening the promised new research centre – the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – near Bracknell in Berkshire in May 1990, she committed Britain to stabilising carbon dioxide emissions by 2005, which actually meant a 30 per cent cut over fifteen years, back to the 1990 figure. ‘This,’ she told George Bush pointedly, ‘is a demanding target.’41the Americans dragged their feet. At the London conference the previous year they had combined with the Soviet Union and Japan to reject an earlier target date for the elimination of CFCs. Now Bush told a conference in Washington that more research was needed before action on carbon dioxide would be justified. Mrs Thatcher pressed him to take the matter seriously.words fell on deaf ears.At the second World Climate Conference in Geneva in November, 137 countries agreed that global warming was a reality and pledged themselves to take action. But while the EC, Japan and Australia advocated freezing CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000, the Americans, this time supported by the USSR and Saudi Arabia, opposed the setting of firm targets. In her speech at the conference – one of her last appearances on the world stage before her fall – Mrs Thatcher tactfully made no direct criticism of American or Russian reluctance. But for once she had to admit that Europe was showing the way. ‘I hope that Europe’s example will help the task of securing worldwide agreement.’42Tickell’s view the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, at which 170 countries including the Americans finally agreed to cut CO2 emissions by 2000, would never have happened without her effort. Five years later the 1997 Kyoto Agreement set a new target of cutting emissions back to the 1990 level by 2010 – only for the US, now led by Bush’s resolutely isolationist and oil-oriented son, to refuse to ratify it.by then Lady Thatcher had changed her mind. As part of her increasingly slavish subservience to American leadership in the late 1990s, she concluded in her last book, Statecraft, that ‘President Bush was quite right to reject the Kyoto protocol’. Half-baked scaremongering about climate change, she now believed, had been seized on by the left to furnish ‘a marvellous excuse for worldwide supra-national socialism’. The environmental movement was just the latest manifestation of fashionable anti-capitalism, containing ‘an ugly streak of anti-Americanism’.43 This U-turn, made for frankly political reasons, marks a sad retreat from her brave pioneering in the late 1980s, when she had in her own way been a good friend of the earth.and the Gulf, in her last months in office, the scandal of the covert arming of Iraq began to break. When the Iran – Iraq war finally ended in stalemate in July 1988, Alan Clark (then still in the DTI) and the latest Minister for Defence Procurement in the MoD, Lord Trefgarne, immediately began lobbying the Foreign Office to lift the 1985 guidelines restricting arms sales to both combatants. Geoffrey Howe was sympathetic and in August minuted Mrs Thatcher, spelling out the commercial benefits of ‘a phased approach to borderline cases’. Charles Powell replied that she was ‘in general content with the strategy’, but it would need careful watching: ‘The PM will wish to be kept very closely in touch at every stage and consulted on all relevant decisions.’44 One of the questions that Lord Justice Scott’s subsequent inquiry had to answer was whether this instruction was obeyed. Having studied the exchanges between Clark, Trefgarne and the new Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave, Scott concluded that after December 1988 the relevant correspondence was not copied to the Prime Minister; she was therefore unaware of the subtle semantic revision which allowed the three ministers henceforth to interpret the guidelines more generously.45 In truth, however, whether or not she knew of the new wording, she cannot have failed to notice that exports to Iraq increased rapidly as soon as the war ended. In October she specifically approved new export credits worth £340 million.46following month Saddam Hussein turned his violence against his own population and started murdering and gassing the Iraqi Kurds.Yet the flow of British machine tools to his munitions factories continued unabated. The only effect on British policy was to make those in the know more anxious to keep it secret: ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, continued to hide behind Howe’s 1985 guidelines, insisting to Parliament that nothing had changed. On the ground the British sales effort could scarcely have been more blatant. In April 1989 no fewer than seventeen major British companies attended the Baghdad arms fair. At last some alarm bells began to ring in Downing Street. In May Mrs Thatcher was sufficiently disturbed by the intelligence she was receiving to set up a Cabinet Office working group on Iraqi procurement (WGIP). But what was it that had disturbed her? According to Scott – based on the evidence she gave to his inquiry in December 1993 – she ‘had become concerned about the extent of the Iraqi network for the procurement of materials and equipment for proliferation purposes, as well as of conventional defence-related goods and equipment, from the UK’.47 In other words she only became concerned when she thought the Iraqis were obtaining nuclear materials, not just conventional equipment, which she had been happy to supply for years.[p]the Ministry of Defence at least one officer was becoming alarmed at ‘the scale on which the Iraqis are building up an arms manufacturing capability’. In June Lt-Col. Richard Glazebrook circulated a paper drawing attention to ‘the way in which UK Ltd is helping Iraq often unwittingly to set up a major indigenous arms industry’.49 He managed to block the export of an infra-red surveillance system but still the build-up went on: he failed to stop a consignment of helicopter spares and a Marconi communications system which would enhance the Iraqi forces’ effectiveness in the field. In July his Secretary of State, George Younger, put up to the Cabinet’s OD committee a proposal to grant export licences for a £3 billion sale by BAe of ‘the “know-how”, equipment and components necessary to enable Iraq to assemble 63 Hawk aircraft’. This, according to Scott, was the first admission to senior ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, that the interpretation of the 1985 guidelines had been changed.50 In their evidence Clark, Trefgarne and Waldegrave argued that the order fell within the revised guidelines, since the Hawk, though capable of being adapted for chemical weapons, was not strictly designed to be lethal. Sharp as ever, Mrs Thatcher wrote in the margin ‘Doubtful’; but she failed to pick up the crucial word ‘revised’.51note by the deputy Cabinet Secretary, Leonard Appleyard, set out the humanitarian case against this latest sale and warned of a hostile press if it was approved. Mrs Thatcher underlined several passages, indicating that she shared these concerns. Charles Powell had initially favoured the sale, since ‘the pot of gold is enticingly large’; and Percy Cradock agreed. But after reading Appleyard’s note Powell changed his mind. ‘Iraq is run by a despicable and violent government which has gloried in the use of CW [chemical weapons] and a substantial defence sale to them would be seen as highly cynical and opportunistic.’ Mrs Thatcher told the Scott Inquiry that she agreed – on moral grounds:
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