Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (68 page)

A subsequent problem was the question of easing the US embargo on arms sales to Argentina. Margaret Thatcher was against it, and was tactically clever in her blocking manoeuvre. Four years after the conflict, the Pentagon and State Departments had prepared a relaxation of the embargo. It awaited only the President’s approval. Just when this looked a mere formality, the British Prime Minister came to Camp David on 15 November 1986 to discuss nuclear arms issues arising from the Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik. At the end of a long agenda, Margaret Thatcher casually slipped into the conversation a last-minute item about the South Atlantic. According to Geoffrey Smith, writing for
The Times
: ‘Oh, arms to Argentina’, she said, for all the world like a housewife checking that she had not forgotten some last minute piece of shopping. ‘You won’t, will you?’ To the horror of his officials, Reagan fell for it. ‘No’, he replied. ‘We won’t.’ So, in one short sentence he killed months of careful preparation within his administration.
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Another island that caused a second flashpoint in US–UK relations was Grenada. In this tiny Caribbean country, an independent nation within the Commonwealth whose Head of State was Queen Elizabeth II, a Marxist elected government was overthrown in a coup by other Marxists. When this happened, the Reagan administration decided to invade Grenada to restore order. The pretext used was a combination of alleged fears for the safety of American students on the island, and the alleged need to respond to a request for military intervention from the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a group of neighbouring islands. The US President notified the British Prime Minister that he was considering the OECS request. He asked her for her thoughts and advice.

Margaret Thatcher received this presidential communication as she was on her way out to a dinner on Monday 24 October 1983. It was a farewell event in honour of the retiring US Ambassador to the Court of St James, John J. Louis Jr. The American Ambassador was just as much in the dark as the British Prime Minister about developments in Grenada. By the time she was back from toasting the departing envoy, a second message arrived from the President. It said that the US invasion of Grenada was about to begin.

Margaret Thatcher went ballistic. After a short midnight meeting with her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, and her Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine
(both dumbfounded by the US action), she telephoned President Reagan on the hot-line. He had to withdraw from a meeting of Congressional leaders to go into a side room to take the Prime Minister’s call. His side of it was all too audible.

‘I could hear him plain as day’, recalled Senator Howard Baker. He said, ‘Margaret …’ Long pause. ‘But Margaret …’, and he came back sort of sheepish and said, ‘Mrs Thatcher has strong reservations about this’.
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They may have been strong, but they were too late. As Reagan wrote in his diary that night, ‘Margaret Thatcher called. She’s upset & doesn’t think we should do it. I couldn’t tell her that it had started.’
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The episode caused the British government no little embarrassment. ‘Humiliation in Grenada’ is the title of the relevant chapter in Geoffrey Howe’s memoirs. The Prime Minister shared his frustrations. ‘I felt dismayed and let down by what had happened’, she recalled. ‘At best, the British Government had been made to look impotent: at worst, we looked deceitful.’
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At Westminster, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, Denis Healey, exploited this discomfort to the full. ‘The British people will not relish the spectacle of their Prime Minister allowing President Reagan to walk all over her’, he said, successfully applying for an emergency debate on Grenada.
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In the middle of this parliamentary storm, Margaret Thatcher was called from her seat on the front bench to take a call from the White House. ‘I was not in the sunniest of moods’, she remembered.
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Sensing the frozen atmosphere from her opening; ‘Hello, Margaret Thatcher here’, Reagan did his best to spread a little sunshine with a folksy quip from his Western movies days.

‘If I were there, Margaret,’ he began, ‘I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.’

‘There’s no need to do that’, she replied, failing to understand the allusion until it was explained to her afterwards.
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The chilliness of her response appeared to unnerve the President. He was used to being cajoled, charmed or vigorously interrupted by Margaret Thatcher. ‘The cold shoulder treatment was something new … momentarily he seemed to panic’, was how the American historian Richard Aldous portrayed the moment.
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For the next three minutes Reagan delivered a stumbling monologue explaining why the invasion of Grenada needed to be planned with great speed and secrecy to avoid leaks. ‘But I want you to know it was no feeling on our
part of lack of confidence at your end’, he assured the Prime Minister. ‘It’s at our end.’
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At the Westminster end of the line, the President’s words were falling on unforgiving ears. He tried again and again to elicit sympathy and understand- ing from his ‘special relationship’ partner, but on this occasion she remained the Iceberg Lady. Finally Reagan offered one last apology: ‘I’m sorry for any embarrassment that we caused you, but please understand that it was just our fear of our own weakness over here with regard to secrecy.’

Margaret Thatcher kept her distance. ‘It was very kind of you to have rung, Ron’, she replied, noticeably not accepting his apology. ‘I must return to the debate in the House. It is a bit tricky.’

Realising this was his cue to ride off into the sunset, Reagan delivered his last line: ‘All right! Go get ’em. Eat ’em alive’, he exhorted the Prime Minister.

‘Goodbye’, she replied, as the curtain fell on the unhappy Grenada episode of their relationship.
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It was a misunderstanding on both sides. The White House never grasped the British sensitivities about the Commonwealth, the role of the Queen (who was said to be much offended) or the importance of not misleading Parliament, as Sir Geoffrey Howe had inadvertently done. Margaret Thatcher was excessively hurt about not being let into the secret by Reagan.

‘That man! After all I’ve done for him, he didn’t even consult me’, she grumbled to one of her Downing Street voices on security issues, Brian Crozier.
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She also exaggerated the illegal bellicosity of the invasion, telling the Irish Taioseach, Garret FitzGerald, that Grenada was as bad as the Soviet take-overs of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. ‘The Americans are worse than the Soviets’, she claimed.
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In reality, the return to stability of Grenada was a limited and brief operation of US military power. After her ruffled feathers had been given time to settle, Margaret Thatcher came to realise this herself. But she also realised that she had to put in some extra spadework to get the ‘special relationship’ back on track.

1984 began badly for Anglo-American relations. There was a tiff about retaliatory action by US forces in Lebanon, punishing the Syrians for their role in terrorist attacks on a US Marine barracks in Beirut. Margaret Thatcher unsuccessfully urged caution and was criticised inside the White House for not standing firm with the US.

A few weeks later a visit to Washington by President Mitterrand was presented as though France was America’s new best friend in the Western alliance. Influential commentators were tipped the wink by the White House that the Reagan–Thatcher honeymoon was fading.
The
Economist
published a two-part report on the dire straits of their relations under the headline ‘Say Something, If Only Goodbye’.
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An unnamed White House source was quoted as saying in the context of Grenada, ‘As usual, our boys lost their lives saving the world from communism, and all we get from London is prissy criticism’.
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Although no great admirer of the magazine, the Prime Minister read these articles and did not enjoy being castigated for her ‘prissy criticism’. She began looking for an opportunity to mend her fences with the President, and took it with skill when he came to London for the G7 Economic Summit in June.

Ronald Reagan was effectively running for re-election in the summer of 1984, and the London summit provided him with a boost to his prospects. However, this was not a certain outcome because several of the G7 leaders wished to use the event as an opportunity to attack US economic policy for its high interest rates and soaring budget deficit. The Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and French President François Mitterrand led the charge against the US President, who was not at his best in explaining America’s role in the world economy.

There was a real danger that the G7 communiqué would criticise the US economic strategy, but from the chair Margaret Thatcher blocked this by acting as the President’s shield, defender and restored best friend. ‘Margaret handled the meetings brilliantly’, wrote Reagan in his diary. ‘More protests by Pierre and François. There was blood on the floor, but not ours.’
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Some of the protests at the summit were wounding to the Prime Minister, who came in for scathing criticism from Pierre Trudeau for her ‘heavy-handed and undemocratic’
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conduct of the meeting in the chair. Reagan thought the Canadian Premier was out of line and expressed his sympathy to Margaret Thatcher as they left the room. ‘Oh, women know when men are being childish’, she riposted.
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Further indications of restored harmony between the British and American leaders came at the fortieth anniversary celebrations of the D-Day landings, where the President’s speech at Pointe du Hoc on 6 June brought tears to Margaret Thatcher’s eyes. Tears of laughter followed three nights later when Reagan the actor memorably recited ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ to Queen
Elizabeth The Queen Mother at a Buckingham Palace dinner party, after discovering that she knew and loved the poems of Robert W. Service.

Over the next few months, personal messages, handwritten notes and phone calls flowed both ways between No. 10 and the Oval Office. They covered such topics as his support during the miners’ strike, his sympathy after the Brighton bombing and her best wishes for his re-election. ‘I’ve got my fingers crossed, my toes crossed, my everything crossed’, Thatcher told Sandra Day O’Connor,
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giving a pantomime performance to America’s first woman Supreme Court Justice from Britain’s first woman Prime Minister
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a few days before the 1984 presidential election. Reagan won it by a landslide.

There were, however, at least two more episodes in which the wires of the ‘special relationship’ nearly got crossed. They were the bombing of Libya and the offer of a nuclear-free world to Mikhail Gorbachev.
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THE BOMBING OF LIBYA

Of all the tests of commitment to the Anglo-American alliance that Margaret Thatcher had to face, the bombing of Libya was the one she passed with the boldest resolve. The decisions she had to take were not easy. But they brought her the greenest of garlands in Washington.

In April 1986, President Reagan decided to order an air strike against Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli in retaliation for various acts of state-sponsored Libyan terrorism in Europe. The final provocation was a bomb attack on a West Berlin nightclub on 5 April. The La Belle discotheque was frequented by US servicemen and was packed with nearly 500 people. Two Americans and a Turkish civilian died. Over 230 people were injured, including fifty off-duty US soldiers. The Americans requested permission for their bases in Britain to be used by the F1-11 aircraft leading the retaliatory raid.

Margaret Thatcher was in a weakened position on the UK domestic scene because of the Westland affair and other troubles.
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She also had initial reservations
about the legality of the American raid, which was difficult to justify as an act of self-defence within the terms of the UN Charter. When she started to take soundings among her cabinet, she found that some of her staunchest allies could not be depended on to support the proposed US action. The Foreign Office was strongly against it, believing that British embassies across the Middle East would be burned and that British interests in the region would be ruined.

In the middle of these secret internal arguments that were raging in Whitehall on Monday 14 April, the Prime Minister called me into her room at the House of Commons to ask what I thought would be the effect of the use of Britain’s USAF bases on the decision-makers in Saudi Arabia – particularly on King Fahd, whom I knew well.

‘The Saudis will criticise Britain publicly, but that will be all’, I replied. ‘King Fahd loathes Gaddafi and will privately be far from sorry. There will be no repercussions commercially or diplomatically.’
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Margaret Thatcher asked me one or two supplementary questions but reacted non-committally. In fact, she had already made up her mind to authorise the use of Britain’s bases after talks at the weekend with General Vernon Walters, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, who had been sent to London as a special presidential envoy.

According to her Foreign Affairs Private Secretary, Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher had slept on the problem overnight. ‘She came down to the office early next morning and announced that we simply must accede to the American request: “That’s what Allies are for.” ’
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All the other American allies in Europe had a different opinion. Only Britain granted the United States F1-11 aircraft overflying rights or related facilities. This isolation from France, Germany, Spain and Italy fortified rather than diminished Margaret Thatcher’s resolve. Yet she knew she would be facing a lot of trouble from public media and parliamentary opinion for her solidarity with President Reagan. When the bombers were on their way from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk to Tripoli, she seemed uncharacteristically nervous. As she attended a book launch at the offices of
The
Economist
to celebrate the publication of Walter Bagehot’s works edited by Norman St John-Stevas, the magazine’s editor, Andrew Knight, expressed his concern about how pale she looked. ‘Since my complexion is never ruddy, I must have appeared like Banquo’s ghost’, she later recalled.
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