Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (70 page)

The Prime Minister moved into a gear so high that it became frankness bordering on rudeness. After introducing him to her other British guests, who included six cabinet ministers, she decided to set what she thought would be the right tone for the occasion.

‘Mr Gorbachev, I want our relationship to get off to a good start’, declared Margaret Thatcher only moments after offering her guest a pre-lunch drink.

I want there to be no misunderstanding between us. So I must tell you that I hate Communism. I hate it because it brings neither freedom, nor justice, nor prosperity to the people. But if you Russians must have it, then you are entitled to it – secure within your own borders.
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Bernard Ingham, the No. 10 Press Secretary who was no slouch at blunt speaking himself, witnessed these words and their effect on the Soviet visitor. ‘I saw that Mr Gorbachev was absolutely astounded,’ he recalled, ‘first by Mrs Thatcher’s directness and secondly by her saying that Russians could have Communism behind their own borders.’
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The frankness did startle Mikhail Gorbachev. He also had few clues of what to expect from this encounter. He had been denied a briefing from the Soviet Foreign Ministry because of jealousy about his trip on the part of the veteran Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko. So he had made his preparations alone with his wife, Raisa Maksimovna,
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at their seaside home in Pitsunda.

Mrs Gorbacheva looked horrified as she listened to the translation of the Prime Minister’s opening salvo, and her feelings became more hostile after the party had sat down to lunch, with Margaret Thatcher continuing her no-holds-barred style of aggressive interrogation. As Mikhail Gorbachev described the growing tension: ‘We sat down to lunch in the not particularly spacious dining room of Chequers. Margaret and I were on one side of the table, Denis and Raisa on the other. Very quickly the argument between me and Margaret became very heated.’
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The argument, described by the Prime Minister as ‘a vigorous two-way debate’,
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seemed rather stronger than that to the Gorbachevs. The heat was initially generated by points and counterpoints in a discussion about the merits of the centralised Soviet economic system versus the advantages of the decentralised Western models of free enterprise. From this, the questioning by Margaret Thatcher focused on the high percentage of Soviet government expenditure on military equipment, and became sharper. ‘She was accusing the Soviet Union of all sorts of unfair things’, recalled Gorbachev. ‘I did not accuse Britain of anything. But she became so heated that at one moment she turned away from me. So I turned away from her, too. We were almost back to back.’
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Reliving the moment in his Moscow office thirty years after the event, in his interview for this biography Mikhail Gorbachev acted out the scene of two offended protagonists turning their backs on each other in high dudgeon.

He continued:

Then I caught Raisa’s eye across the table, and her lips moved to say ‘It’s over!’, and for a moment I wondered if we should leave. But then I thought to myself, ‘We are guests
here, the conversation must continue’. I said quite firmly to the Prime Minister: ‘Mrs Thatcher, I know you are a person with an acute mind and high personal principles. Please bear in mind that I am the same kind of person.’ She reacted with just a nod, so then I said, ‘Let me assure you that I have not come here with instructions from the Politburo to persuade you to become a member of the Communist Party’.

Reliving the moment as Mikhail Gorbachev the amateur impressionist, he imitated the sound of Margaret Thatcher bursting into laughter: ‘ “Whoarrhaha!” she cried, and then others laughed too. So the tension was broken, and the discussion continued, although it soon hotted up again but in better ways.’

A second altercation arose after Gorbachev claimed that under the communist system, citizens of the Soviet Union lived ‘joyfully’. Margaret Thatcher swooped on that assertion by asking, in that case, ‘Why did the Soviet authorities not allow its people to leave the country as easily as they could leave Britain?’
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This started a lively debate on the prohibitions imposed on Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate to Israel. Well briefed on this topic by her friend the Chief Rabbi, Margaret Thatcher gave her guest the ‘hair dryer treatment’, with blast after blast of facts and statistics about Moscow’s treatment of the
refuseniks
. Gorbachev, although unprepared for the vigour of the exchange, came back confidently with the claim that ‘89 per cent’ of those who applied to emigrate from the Soviet Union were allowed to do so. This was not a true statistic. But with a diplomatic
politesse
that she did not always exhibit, Margaret Thatcher let it pass, not least because Gorbachev added, ‘and we are thinking about that’,
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which she interpreted as a sign that there might be further relaxations in Jewish emigration.

After lunch the Prime Minister accompanied only by her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, her Private Secretary, Charles Powell, and her interpreter took Mikhail Gorbachev and three of his party to a sitting room for coffee. This private session was scheduled for thirty minutes, but lasted for over two and a half hours. It began with the two principals settling into large armchairs by the fireplace. Margaret Thatcher took off her patent leather shoes, tucked her feet under the chair cushion and pulled some papers out of her handbag. Gorbachev reached for a folder and took out a memorandum headed, ‘On Conversation with Thatcher’. But then he suddenly had second thoughts and asked, ‘Could we do without these papers?’

‘Gladly’, replied the Prime Minister, returning her briefing notes to her handbag.
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The two leaders set off on an unstructured agenda. The first highlight was a passionate plea from Gorbachev for disarmament and an ending of the Cold War. Unaccustomed as she was to not being able to get a word in edgeways, Margaret Thatcher eventually managed to raise one topical symptom of Cold War trouble-making, which was the Soviet funding of the miners’ strike led by Arthur Scargill, then in its tenth month.

‘Your trade unions are helping our coal miners with money’, she said. ‘The strike continues. It is doing great damage to the economy of England. For the time being, I take that quite calmly. But I request that your trade unions should cease the financial support, otherwise we will resort to sanctions.’
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According to his aide, Leonid Zamyatin,
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Gorbachev was visibly taken aback, and said that he had ‘nothing to do with the trade unions’.
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At this point, ‘Margaret got pretty rowdy’,
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according to Gorbachev, as she claimed that the money going from Moscow’s trade unions to Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers must have had the blessing of the Politburo. ‘No, this is an internal matter’, replied her Soviet visitor. ‘You may be able to direct your trade unions, but we can’t.’ Sparks flew from all directions in the Chequers drawing room on this subject. ‘I think, looking back on it, that both of us were being disingenuous’, was Mikhail Gorbachev’s retrospective opinion. ‘This matter was not a Politburo decision, but the Politburo were aware of it.’
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The most important area of engagement at this first meeting between the two leaders was arms control. Gorbachev threw himself into this subject, offering his views on disarmament with a passion that sounded both new and sincere. This part of the discussion also became heated and personal. ‘Mrs Thatcher, you are a modern and forward-looking woman leader. Don’t you feel uncomfortable sitting on top of such a huge Western arsenal of nuclear weapons?’ asked Gorbachev, having produced from his pocket a diagram with his own markings in green ink, which illustrated all the millions who would be killed if these weapons were fired.

The Prime Minister was not going to let her guest get away with such a rhetorical debater’s question. ‘She immediate counter-attacked me. She wouldn’t give an inch. Neither of us allowed the other to get the edge’, was Gorbachev’s version of their argument. ‘But in the end I think we both greatly valued these exchanges.’
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Margaret Thatcher must have been interested in her guest’s surprisingly sweeping ideas for mutual disarmament, but she did not respond as positively to them as he had hoped. She was aware that the Soviet Union’s leaders were greatly worried by President Reagan’s plans for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI). This worry was discernible in the mood music of the conversations at Chequers. Gorbachev knew that the British Prime Minister had concerns of her own about SDI, on which she differed from Reagan because she did not see this so-called ‘Star Wars’ technology as a means of eliminating all nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, she was determined not to let her Soviet visitor get the faintest impression that there were disagreements on this issue between Washington and London.

‘Do not waste my time’, she warned Gorbachev, ‘on trying to persuade me to say to Ron Reagan: “Do not go ahead with SDI. That will get nowhere.”’
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In fact, nobody’s time was wasted at Chequers on Sunday 16 December. It had been a major breakthrough of diplomatic communication and personal chemistry.

Charles Powell, the highly overworked note-taker throughout the five hours worth of talks, recalled:

Gorbachev made an extraordinary impression. He was such a contrast to the succession of Kremlin geriatrics like Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. He talked and argued like a top Western politician. He didn’t need briefs or notes or advisers. He just sat there and slugged it out with her. I think he was using the meeting as an anvil on which he could hammer out his new ideas until they were ‘Thatcher tested’, conscious that she would be a channel to President Reagan.
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Such a channel was sorely needed, since the Americans and the Soviets were not speaking to each other at the highest levels. Their communications had broken down since President Reagan had given great offence to the Kremlin’s leaders by describing their country as an ‘Evil Empire … the focus of evil in the modern world’.
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As he left the Prime Minister’s country house at the unexpectedly late time of 5.50 p.m., Gorbachev quoted an old Russian proverb: ‘Mountain folk cannot live without guests any more than they can live without air. But if the guests stay longer than necessary, they choke.’
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Far from choking, Margaret Thatcher was immensely cheered by the rapport that she had been able to establish with the rising Politburo member she expected to emerge as the next Soviet leader. As his car was heading down the Chequers drive, she gave an ecstatic debriefing on the private talks to her senior aides.

‘He sounds like a man you can do business with’, observed Bernard Ingham.

‘Yes, he certainly is’, replied the Prime Minister.

‘Can I say that to the press?’ Bernard Ingham asked.
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That was how the phrase went round the world, with Margaret Thatcher using it herself the following day in a BBC interview: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’
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When these words were translated to the object of them, he was pleased. Mikhail Gorbachev recalled:

I had no complaint! In fact, I used the same language when I reported to the Politburo very positively on my British visit. There was a lot of discussion and debate around the table, which I summed up by telling my colleagues, ‘We should continue to do business with Margaret Thatcher. And we did!’
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BRIDGE BUILDING BETWEEN MOSCOW AND WASHINGTON

The first business, after the success of her dialogue at Chequers with Mikhail Gorbachev, was for Margaret Thatcher to make the most of her opportunities as a bridge builder between Moscow and Washington. To take the initiative in this role, she had to fulfil a schedule of intercontinental travelling that was heroic even by the standards of prime ministerial aviation.

In the space of six days she held talks with Russian, Chinese and American leaders on three continents. Her fifty-five hours of flying time included sectors from London to Beijing to sign the Hong Kong agreement; from Beijing to Hong Kong to reassure its people that they had not been sold out; from Hong Kong to Hawaii, where she insisted on a nocturnal visit to Pearl Harbor; from Hawaii
to Washington; and finally a helicopter flight from Washington to Camp David.
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President Reagan was waiting at the aircraft steps to greet her with a kiss on the cheek and a lift in his golf cart. ‘I sometimes thought I was directing
Gone with the Wind
’, commented Bernard Ingham.
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The Camp David discussions were difficult but ended in a considerable diplomatic success for Margaret Thatcher. After she had briefed the President on her positive view of Gorbachev, SDI dominated the agenda. ‘This was the first occasion on which I had heard President Reagan speaking about SDI’, she recalled. ‘He did so with passion. He was at his most idealistic.’
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This was a polite way of saying she thought he was wrong. Reagan had developed an optimistic view of SDI, believing it could eliminate all nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. As a scientist, Margaret Thatcher felt this was nonsense. She was in favour of further SDI research, but she feared that reliance on deployed SDI technology would undermine all other forms of nuclear deterrence, including Britain’s Trident. She argued long and hard to change the President’s mind, but with no success.

Charles Powell captured the tiring atmospherics: ‘I saw the President’s eyes stray towards the clock calculating how many more minutes to a Martini and lunch as she rampaged on about the finer details of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.’
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The official White House minutes suggest that the Martinis, even when they came, afforded no respite: ‘During the cocktail session before lunch, the President, Mrs Thatcher and Ambassador Price continued discussions at some length.’
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