Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (37 page)

The speech, which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall, covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defence at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’.

I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. If they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.

The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The
Daily Telegraph
entitled its editorial comment ‘The Truth About Russia’.
The Times
admitted that ‘there has been complacency in the West’. Nor was the Soviet reaction long in coming. The Soviet Embassy wrote a letter to Reggie Maudling, and the ambassador called on the Foreign Office to protest in person. A stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs. But it was some apparatchik in the office of
Red Star
, the Red Army newspaper, his imagination surpassing his judgement, who coined the description of me as ‘The Iron Lady’.

It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time of the most grotesque misjudgements. This was one of them. When Gordon Reece read on the Press Association tapes what
Red Star
had said he was ecstatic and rushed into my office to tell me about it. I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent. They never did me a greater favour.

The election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States at the end of 1976 brought to the White House a man who put human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda. One could at least be sure that he
would not make the mistake of his predecessor, who had refused to meet Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.

President Carter was soon to be tested. In January 1977 the text of ‘Charter 77’, the manifesto of the Czech dissidents, was smuggled into West Germany and published. The following month Jimmy Carter wrote personally to Professor Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and leading dissident. This change of tone was reassuring.

But I soon became worried about other aspects of the Carter Administration’s approach to foreign policy. President Carter had a passionate commitment to disarmament, demonstrated both by his early cancellation of the B1 strategic bomber and the renewed impetus he gave to SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which President Ford had initiated with the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, President Carter found that he could only take action to improve human rights against countries linked to the West, not against countries that were hostile and strong enough to ignore him.

As for the SALT II negotiations, it was possible to argue about the particular formulae, but the really important strategic fact was that the Soviet Union had in recent years been arming far faster than the Americans. Any mere ‘arms limitation’ agreement was bound to stabilize the military balance in such a way as to recognize this. Only deep arms
cuts
on the one hand, or a renewed drive for stronger American defences on the other, could reverse it. When I visited the United States again in September 1977, the Carter Administration was still enjoying its political honeymoon. President Carter had brought a new informal style to the White House, which appeared to accord with the mood of the times. Although there was unease about some of his appointments, this was largely put down to Washington resentment against outsiders. In Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Adviser, he had two remarkable assistants, whose differences of outlook were not yet apparent.

I had met Jimmy Carter himself in London in May when he attended the G7 summit. In spite of my growing doubts about his foreign policy, I liked him and looked forward to meeting him again. At our discussion in the White House the President was most keen to explain and justify his recently launched initiative for a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Although he had clearly mastered the details and was a persuasive advocate, I was not convinced. Believing as I did in the vital importance of a credible nuclear deterrent, and knowing that nuclear weapons had to be
tested in order to be credible, I could not go along with the policy. Equally, I was unable to agree with President Carter, or indeed Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, on their preferred approach to settling the Rhodesian question. The Americans were insisting that the Rhodesian security forces be dismantled. But I knew that would never be acceptable to the white population – who still enjoyed military superiority over the ‘armed struggle’ – without some real guarantee of peace. The Americans were also toying with the idea of imposing sanctions against South Africa, which seemed to me equally ill-judged considering that they needed to have the South African Government on their side if they were to persuade Ian Smith to compromise.

At least on this occasion I did not have to contend with hostile briefing from the embassy, which was ironic considering that the new ambassador, Peter Jay, was Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law. There had been loud accusations of nepotism when this appointment had been announced. But I liked and admired Peter Jay personally. His understanding of monetary economics would have made him a welcome recruit to the Shadow Cabinet.

Meanwhile, uncertainties about the direction of American policy and the extent of Soviet ambitions had increasingly focused attention on those countries which were balanced uneasily between the two blocs. Of these, Yugoslavia had a special significance. Since Marshal Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had been in an anomalous but important position.

The fragility of Yugoslavia was both symbolized by and depended upon the state of Tito’s own health. It was an open question whether the Soviets would try to reassert control in the chaos which was widely expected to follow his death. At eighty-five, he was still in control of events, but ailing. I had wanted to visit Yugoslavia for some time, but my visit was twice postponed because Tito was not well enough to receive me. On a bitter early December day in 1977, however, in the company of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a comrade in arms and old friend of the Yugoslav President from the Second World War, I arrived in Belgrade.

We visited Tito at his Belgrade home. His was a powerful personality, retaining some of the outward panache of his flamboyant partisan past, but leaving no doubt about the inner steel that explained his post-war dominance. We discussed and broadly agreed about the Soviet threat. The looming question of his legacy did not figure in our talks. Perhaps he had already concluded, for all the elaborate constitutional safeguards, that it would indeed be the
déluge.

Before I departed for Yugoslavia, Alfred Sherman had asked me to raise with Tito the case of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former friend and colleague and for many years most insistent domestic critic. Djilas had been one of a number of political prisoners recently freed but was, I understood, the object of continuing harassment. It seemed likely that he would soon disappear back into prison. I decided on a shot across Tito’s bows. I said with studied innocence how pleased I was that Djilas had been released. Tito glowered.

‘Yes, he’s out,’ the President said, ‘but he’s up to his old tricks. And if he goes on upsetting our constitution he will go straight back to jail.’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a man like Djilas will do you far more harm in prison than out of it.’

Fitzroy Maclean chipped in, ‘She’s right, you know.’ Tito gave me a hard look. There was a pause in the conversation before he turned to other matters. As far as I know, Djilas stayed out of jail – only to suffer more harassment for his independent thinking under the brutal regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

In fact, though I did not know it at the time, three developments were opening up the long-term prospect of turning back the Soviet advance. The first, paradoxically, was that they had become too arrogant. It is a natural and often fatal trait of the totalitarian to despise opponents. The Soviets believed that the failure of western politicians signified that western peoples were resigned to defeat. A little more subtlety and forethought might have secured the Soviet leaders far greater gains. As it was, particularly through the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they provoked a western reaction which finally destroyed the Soviet Union itself.

The second development was the election in September 1978 of a Polish Pope. John Paul II would fire a revolution in eastern Europe which shook the Soviet Empire to its core.

Finally, there was the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a serious contender for the American Presidency. I had met Governor Reagan shortly after my becoming Conservative Leader in 1975. Even before then, I knew something about him because Denis had returned home one evening in the late 1960s full of praise for a remarkable speech Ronald Reagan had just delivered at the Institute of Directors. I read the text myself and quickly saw what Denis meant. When we met in person I was immediately won over by his charm, sense of humour and directness. In the succeeding years I read his speeches, advocating tax cuts as the root to wealth creation and stronger defences as an alternative to détente. I also
read many of his fortnightly broadcasts to the people of California, which his Press Secretary sent over regularly for me. I agreed with them all. In November 1978 we met again in my room in the House of Commons.

In the early years Ronald Reagan had been dismissed by much of the American political elite, though not by the American electorate, as a right-wing maverick who could not be taken seriously. (I had heard that before somewhere.) Now he was seen by many thoughtful Republicans as their best ticket back to the White House. Whatever Ronald Reagan had gained in experience, he had not done so at the expense of his beliefs. I found them stronger than ever. When he left my study I reflected on how different things might look if such a man were President of the United States. But in November 1978 such a prospect seemed a long way off.

Leader of the Opposition March 1977–March 1979

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did none of the things subsequently claimed for it by its exponents. It did not halt, let alone reverse, the advance of socialism: indeed, it kept the Labour Government in office and enabled it to complete the nationalization of the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Nor was it responsible for the frail but real economic recovery which gradually improved the Labour Party’s political standing in 1977/78: that was the result of the financial measures imposed by the IMF several months before the Pact was agreed. It did not help Mr Callaghan to marginalize and defeat the Left; indeed, the Left emerged strong enough to take over the Labour Party within a few years.

The real benefits were quite different and completely unintended. First, the fact that the Liberal Party demonstrated the closeness of its approach to that of Labour gave a salutary warning to potential Conservatives who, for whatever reason, flirted with the idea of voting Liberal as a more civilized alternative to socialism. The Pact therefore hardened our support. Secondly, I can see now that in March 1977 we were not yet ready to form the kind of government which could have achieved a long-term shift away from the policies which had led to Britain’s decline. Neither the Shadow Cabinet, nor the Parliamentary Party, nor in all probability the electorate, would have been prepared to take the necessary but unpalatable medicine, because they had not witnessed how far the disease had spread. It took the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 to change all that. Finally, the Government’s survival was a real, if well-disguised, blessing for me. I benefited greatly from the next two gruelling years as Leader of the Opposition. I learned more about how to achieve what I wanted, even
though I always felt in a minority in the Shadow Cabinet. I also became a more effective debater, public speaker and campaigner, all of which would stand me in good stead as Prime Minister. Above all, perhaps, I had the opportunity to demonstrate both to myself and to others that I had that elusive ‘instinct’ for what ordinary people feel – a quality which, I suspect, one is simply born with or not, but which is sharpened and burnished through adversity.