Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (98 page)

In Conquest’s view, the coming years would be the ‘period of enormous danger’. What worried him even more than Soviet behaviour was ‘the erosion of Western sense and nerve’,
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especially because of what he considered to be the weak character of President Jimmy Carter. ‘I feel the real urgency’, he wrote to her in late August 1979, ‘to stiffen up Washington’, a sentiment which Mrs Thatcher underlined in green ink. Conquest feared, in particular, that the Soviet army might contrive military ‘incidents’ in West Germany which would then lead to a ceasefire of which the Russians could take advantage – ‘And the Soviet armies are now [that is, would be if this happened] on the Rhine.’
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He believed that the American official understanding of the problem was poor, and that Mrs Thatcher could make matters better: ‘The way you keep alerting the West to reality is splendid, and inspiriting.’
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He thought that Mrs Thatcher’s warnings were more likely to strike home with the US administration than anything from inside the Washington machine.

Mrs Thatcher also drew on Hugh Thomas. Thomas was less of an expert on the Soviet Union than Conquest, but was better connected in British
academic and literary life. He played an important role in bringing together other experts, such as the military historian Michael Howard, Elie Kedourie
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and Leonard Schapiro, and in introducing Mrs Thatcher to a wide range of thinkers. He also furnished her with a historian’s justification for taking the advice of outsiders. He sent her a note on the use of ‘irregulars’ (Churchill’s word) by past prime ministers, and their role in countering official advice: ‘Churchill, for example, as recorded by Sir John Colville, “had no love for the Foreign Office [since] he suspected them of pursuing their own policy irrespective of what the Government might wish, and he mistrusted their judgment” … naturally it is desirable to avoid drawing general conclusions from mere chance remarks. But a historical reflection may here, too, yield a useful contemporary judgment.’
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Part of Mrs Thatcher’s hold over the intellectuals, as had been the case in opposition, was her female allure. Conquest wrote to Ian Gow in 1983, mentioning a ‘party Hugh Thomas gave last November for the Prime Minister to meet a dozen or so writers. Several have written me about it and I think you may like Anthony Powell’s
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comment. He says that afterwards “I did some market research as to whether people find her as attractive as I do and all, including Vidia [Naipaul],
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were in complete agreement.” ’
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Philip Larkin,
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the poet, was similarly smitten: ‘Very few people are both right and beautiful.’
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In the run-up to the 1979 election, Conquest floated the idea that Mrs Thatcher agree to appoint him ambassador to the UN once she became prime minister. This she declined to do and her native caution weighed in against offering him any other job. ‘I wish we could use him,’ she scribbled on a memo from Richard Ryder, ‘but I think it would have to be through the Centre for Policy Studies & that is mostly unpaid!’
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Despite her affection for the irregulars, she maintained her view that the paid Civil Service should not be formally supplanted at the public expense. Conquest left Britain for a better-paid living than he could find in England, ending up at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. Their correspondence continued and remained important to her, but Conquest was obviously not in a position to advise her on every twist and turn of policy. This advice was provided by the regular Civil Service.

It would be wrong to suggest that Mrs Thatcher was dissatisfied by the
officials with whom she dealt most intensely over Soviet policy. She reposed trust in Bryan Cartledge, her first foreign affairs private secretary, whom she inherited from Jim Callaghan, although his attitudes were different from hers. When Cartledge left the job to become ambassador to Hungary in September 1979, he was replaced by Michael Alexander, one of the Foreign Office’s greatest experts on East–West relations, and a man of formidable intellect. From time to time, his views would hew too closely to Foreign Office orthodoxy for her taste, but she respected him. According to Clive Whitmore, her principal private secretary, ‘Having seen the Russians at close quarters, Michael was under no illusions about how tough they were. She relied very much on his advice. He wasn’t at all soft. But as a good member of the diplomatic corps he realized that we had to live with the Soviets, which was her approach too.’
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Alexander’s opinion of Mrs Thatcher was also respectful, but he thought that she was ‘inclined to oversimplify and overdramatize the issues’.
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With Alexander’s help, Foreign Office views were conveyed to Mrs Thatcher in ways which minimized friction, but there were differences. When Carrington invited her to come and meet ‘the Foreign Office gurus’, including Rodric Braithwaite
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and Christopher Mallaby,
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so that she could compare them with ‘your own gurus’, she said, ‘Oh, they don’t know anything about Russia at all.’ When she came, however, she was impressed by the knowledge displayed.
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Mallaby gave a detailed presentation of the difficulties the Soviet Union faced on a range of economic, technological, social and political fronts. ‘Well,’ Mrs Thatcher replied, ‘if it’s like that, the Soviet Union can’t survive, can it?’
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The officials politely demurred. ‘The germs of change are at work inside Soviet society. The system may eventually become more democratic and less expansionist. But it will not easily happen while the Soviet Communist Party and its apparatus of repression are still intact’.
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The disagreement centred not on knowledge, but on attitude. How should Britain deal with a hostile Soviet Union whose global influence and military might were beyond question, but whose long-term
future was uncertain? The Foreign Office had put its eggs in the basket of détente several years earlier, and many officials were ‘deeply hostile to the speeches she had made on Helsinki and détente’.
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They considered her rhetoric overly provocative and undiplomatic. Foreign Office officials were sensitive to Soviet criticism in this regard, so much so that, on one occasion, when Moscow objected to the West’s oft-stated desire to negotiate from a ‘position of strength’, Mallaby penned an internal memo urging that Britain oblige. It might be ‘preferable’, he suggested to a colleague, ‘if Ministers said that we wish to negotiate on equal terms or that we are ensuring that we shall not negotiate from a position of weakness’.
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This was just the sort of Foreign Office timidity that infuriated Mrs Thatcher. Whenever such requests reached her, she took very little notice.

Mrs Thatcher was always far more willing than the Foreign Office to draw attention to the Soviet Union’s failure to live up to its promises. The continued suppression of Soviet dissidents, in defiance of the Helsinki Accord, provided an important example. Like all bureaucracies, the Foreign Office was instinctively suspicious of contacts which were not government to government. It therefore regarded dissidents as a bit of a nuisance, and diplomats in Moscow reported that they were highly unpopular within their own country. Here was another role for the irregulars, notably the Conservative MEP Lord Bethell.
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Mrs Thatcher always encouraged them to bring dissidents who had managed to get out of the Soviet Union to come and call on her, so that she could hear their stories and draw attention to their plight.
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She regarded human rights abuses as indicative of the disease of Soviet totalitarianism, and, of course, as evidence of bad faith over the détente agreed at Helsinki, and wished to publicize them. The Foreign Office disliked this, and tended to regard the subject as an irritating distraction.

Whatever the long-term prognosis for the Soviet Union, Mrs Thatcher was determined to challenge Moscow from the start of her premiership. The Foreign Office was uncomfortable with the idea that confrontation might be more effective than quiet diplomacy. As John Coles,
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who succeeded Michael Alexander in her private office, put it: ‘The FCO never
really shared her attitude towards the Soviet Union. They were used to dealing with the Soviets and thought it was better dealing with them than not. I think they were often frustrated that she was not supportive of having a relationship with the Soviet Union.’
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Some officials believed this approach stemmed from her limited experience. John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, spoke discreetly with US Embassy officials to counsel ‘patience with the Thatcher government, which he said had a “learning curve” and an ingrained “emotional” resistance toward negotiations with the USSR’.
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Carrington was less willing to put her views down to inexperience: ‘I don’t think she thought there was any point in negotiations. The aim was to win the Cold War really. I don’t think she saw an end to it at all, but that we had to go on with it because they were dangerous wicked people.’
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The very title of the analytical paper which the Foreign Office presented to Mrs Thatcher in her first autumn in office illustrated the problem. It was called ‘Managing Russia’. Mrs Thatcher did not want to ‘manage’ the Soviet Union she faced in the early 1980s, but to defeat it.

The Carter administration was under no illusion about the change Mrs Thatcher would bring to East–West relations. ‘Tories are far less convinced than Labor that detente works to the West’s advantage,’ Brzezinski warned Carter shortly after Mrs Thatcher came to office.
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In his first letter to the new Prime Minister, congratulating her on her election victory, Carter stressed the overwhelming importance he attached to the ratification of his Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II). Under this treaty, both sides agreed to broad and equal limits on strategic offensive nuclear weapons systems. Mrs Thatcher, who had no love for SALT II, scribbled, ‘We shall have to send quite a long and frank reply.’
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Her concerns about the agreement were twofold. She worried that the deal could see Britain’s own nuclear capacity bargained away. She was also concerned that this public focus on limiting nuclear weapons would make it more difficult to achieve the increase in Western nuclear capacity that she believed essential. In her view, the recent Soviet build-up of SS-20 missiles threatened the system of nuclear deterrence that had kept the peace in Europe since the Second World War.
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The SS-20 was an intermediate-range missile designed to reach European targets, but not the United States. Nuclear deterrence was effective only so long as a potential aggressor believed that a nuclear strike would result in nuclear retaliation. Many questioned whether, faced with a Soviet nuclear strike limited to the European theatre, the US would
unleash its long-range, US-based ballistic missiles, thus risking a Soviet attack on the continental US. Europe-based nuclear forces were largely outdated and ineffective, so, for nuclear deterrence to retain credibility, Mrs Thatcher believed that it was crucial for NATO to station new US Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF),
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consisting of Pershing II missiles and ground-launched Cruise missiles (GLCMs), on European soil. ‘What she was acutely aware of, relatively quickly after coming into office, was that the alliance had to develop a credible and coherent policy on INF,’ recalled Clive Whitmore. ‘There was a sense that if the alliance did not produce a credible policy we would be seriously outmanoeuvred by the Soviets.’
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When Mrs Thatcher’s reply to Carter’s letter was finally sent, more than a month later, she urged him to ‘strike the right balance’ between SALT II ratification and making sure that public opinion grasped NATO’s need to ‘maintain and modernise its nuclear forces’. There had to be ‘concrete decisions’ on INF modernization and deployment by the end of the year.
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Receiving the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, in Downing Street a week after coming into office, Mrs Thatcher discussed INF with him. He told her that West Germany would accept the new nuclear weapons on its soil – the first ever intermediate-range missiles with the capacity to hit Moscow – but only if other non-nuclear European powers would also agree to do so. She was encouraged by his desire to help, and held forth to him about the need for the West to reverse the psychological defeat inflicted on it by Brezhnev outwitting Carter over his attempt to develop the neutron bomb in 1978. She felt the mood had strengthened since then: ‘The full extent of the Soviet military build-up was now much more widely recognised in the UK,’
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and so the government was authorized by public opinion to spend more on defence. NATO had to counter the SS-20s. Schmidt agreed, but warned her of the Soviet propaganda campaign against INF deployment which would now commence.

A month later, Mrs Thatcher also received General Alexander Haig. At the beginning of 1981, he would re-enter Mrs Thatcher’s life when he became Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, but the occasion for his call in June 1979 was his retirement as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. Mrs Thatcher told him that the West had allowed its military position to fall from superiority over the Soviet Union to equivalence ‘without, apparently, noticing it’.
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Her belief that American leadership was absolutely vital to the health of the alliance stood in contrast to the views of President Giscard d’Estaing
of France. When he called on Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street in November, Giscard told her that ‘The period of American strategic supremacy was over’ and that he sought some ‘European grouping’ to defend the West.
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She was not tempted in Giscard’s direction; but so long as Carter, with his indecision and naivety, was at the White House, she could never hope for a relationship with the US President which was more than correct, and the alliance would be leaderless.