The Downing Street Years (27 page)

’I agree with every single word of that,’ said Geoffrey. His speech won over some of the doubters and ensured that we had a comfortable win. Nevertheless, in my own speech later I felt the need to fasten down our victory by taking the arguments of Ted Heath and others head on:

Even though the ‘wets’ would continue to be sceptics for another six months, our policy had already begun to succeed. The early signs of recovery in the summer of 1981 were confirmed by statistics in the following quarter, which marked the start of a long period of sustained economic growth. Political recovery followed in the wake of these early signs of improvement, with better poll figures in the spring of 1982. We were about to find ourselves in the Falklands War, but we had already won the second Battle of Britain.

CHAPTER VI

We were not to know it at the time, but 1981 was the last year of the West’s retreat before the axis of convenience between the Soviet Union and the Third World. The year began with Iran’s release of US hostages in a manner calculated to humiliate President Carter and ended with the crushing, albeit temporarily, of Solidarity in Poland. The post-Vietnam drift of international politics, with the Soviet Union pushing further into the Third World with the help of Cuban surrogates, and the United States reacting with a nervous defensiveness, had settled into an apparently fixed pattern. Several consequences flowed from that. The Soviet Union was increasingly arrogant; the Third World was increasingly aggressive in its demands for international redistribution of wealth; the West was increasingly apt to quarrel with itself, and to cut special deals with bodies like OPEC; and our friends in Third World countries, seeing the fate of the Shah, were increasingly inclined to hedge their bets. Such countervailing trends as had been set in motion — in particular, the 1979 decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing in Europe — had not yet been given concrete effect or persuaded people that the tide had turned. In fact it had just begun to do so.

The election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in November 1980 was as much of a watershed in American affairs as my own election victory in May 1979 was in those of the United Kingdom, and, of course, a greater one in world politics. As the years went by, the British example steadily influenced other countries in
different continents, particularly in economic policy. But Ronald Reagan’s election was of immediate and fundamental importance, because it demonstrated that the United States, the greatest force for liberty that the world has known, was about to reassert a self-confident leadership in world affairs. I never had any doubt of the importance of this change and from the first I regarded it as my duty to do everything I could to reinforce and further President Reagan’s bold strategy to win the Cold War which the West had been slowly but surely losing.

I heard the news of the American election result in the early hours of Wednesday 5 November and quickly sent my warmest congratulations, inviting the President-elect to visit Britain soon. I had met Governor Reagan twice before when I was Leader of the Opposition. I had been immediately struck by his warmth, charm and complete lack of affectation — qualities which never altered in the years of leadership which lay ahead. Above all, I knew that I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did; not just about policies but about a philosophy of government, a view of human nature, all the high ideals and values which lie — or ought to lie — beneath any politician’s ambition to lead his country.

It was easy for lesser men to underrate Ronald Reagan, as many of his opponents had done in the past. His style of work and decision-making was apparently detached and broad-brush — very different from my own. This was in part the result of our two very different systems of government rather than differences of temperament. He laid down clear general directions for his Administration, and expected his subordinates to carry them out at the level of detail. These objectives were the recovery of the American economy through tax cuts, the revival of American power by means of a defence build-up, and the reassertion of American self-confidence. Ronald Reagan succeeded in attaining these objectives because he not only advocated them; in a sense, he embodied them. He was a buoyant, self-confident, good-natured American who had risen from poverty to the White House — the American dream in action — and who was not shy about using American power or exercising American leadership in the Atlantic alliance. In addition to inspiring the American people, he went on later to inspire the people behind the Iron Curtain by speaking honest words about the evil empire that oppressed them.

At this point, however, the policies of military, economic and technological competition with the Soviet Union were only beginning to be put in place; and President Reagan still had to face a largely sceptical
audience at home and particularly among his allies, including most of my colleagues in the Government. I was perhaps his principal cheerleader in NATO.

So I was soon delighted to learn that the new president wished me to be the first foreign head of government to visit the United States after he took office. At 3.45 on the afternoon of Wednesday 25 February the RAF VC10 on which I travelled on such occasions took off for Washington. Peter Carrington was with me. He did not altogether share my view of the President’s policies and was intent on pursuing lines which I knew would in practice be quite fruitless, given the President’s unshakeable commitment to a limited number of positions. The US was already meeting opposition from its allies on a number of issues such as arms control, its support for the military government in El Salvador, and increasingly the size of the US deficit. We feared that the new Administration’s plans for tax cuts might widen the deficit — though at this stage we were still hopeful that the President would succeed in achieving the large expenditure cuts he had put before Congress. With so many important things to discuss, I could see no point in raising the issue of Namibia which Peter Carrington wanted to do. I knew that the Americans would not press the South Africans to withdraw from Namibia unless the 20,000 or so Cubans also withdrew from neighbouring Angola. What is more, I privately thought that they were fully justified in asserting this linkage. In any case, there is one principle of diplomacy which diplomats ought to recognize more often: there is no point in engaging in conflict with a friend when you are not going to win and the cost of losing may be the end of the friendship.

I spent the morning of my first day in Washington in meetings with the President — first tête-à-tête, then with the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, and Peter Carrington present, and finally with members of the US Cabinet. Two events which occurred on the eve of our discussions had a large impact on them.

First, the Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Lawrence Eagleburger, had come to Britain and other European capitals to show us a dossier of evidence substantiating the US claim that arms from Cuba, acting as a surrogate for the Soviet Union, were pouring into El Salvador to support the revolution against the pro-western, if undoubtedly unsavoury, government there. There was still some difference of view about whether the threat was as serious as the US claimed. But the evidence which we now saw made it easier to expess support for the American objectives in the region and to resist the pressure from other lobbies. A statement was issued by the Foreign Office just
before I left for America to this effect. President Reagan explained to me his determination to pursue a new policy to resist communist subversion via Cuba, which also involved closer US relations with what it saw as a vulnerable and important neighbour, Mexico. I understood all this and agreed with it: but I warned of the danger of losing the propaganda war on El Salvador — the reporting was very one-sided.

The second and much more important development was a speech by President Brezhnev, proposing an international summit and offering a moratorium on theatre nuclear forces (TNF) in Europe. Discussion about how the new Administration should respond dominated the hyperactive Washington media world. I had publicly expressed caution both about the prospect of an early summit meeting and about the Russian TNF proposals, which would have left them with overwhelming superiority since they had deployed and we had not. President Reagan turned out to be of the same mind. Both of us were well aware of Soviet tactics and of the likelihood that this was only part of their attempt to disorientate and divide their western opponents. This was the latest phase in a Soviet propaganda battle in which they proposed no further deployment of nuclear weapons just when they had completed stationing their own modernized weapon systems. This issue was to dominate alliance politics for the next six years.

When I arrived in Washington I was the centre of attention not just because of my closeness to the new president but for another less flattering reason. As I left for America, US readers were learning from a long article in
Time
entitled ‘Embattled but Unbowed’ that my Government was beset with difficulties. The US press and commentators suggested that given the similarity of economic approach of the British and US Governments, the economic problems we were now facing — above all high and rising unemployment — would soon be faced in the US too. This in turn prompted some members of the Administration and others close to it — but never for a moment the President himself — to explain that the alleged failures of the ‘Thatcher experiment’ stemmed from our failure to be sufficiently radical. Indeed, while I was in Washington Treasury Secretary Donald Regan spoke on similar lines to Congress before slipping away to join a lunch at which I was the main guest; this predictably received plenty of press coverage in Britain. I took every occasion to explain the facts of the case both to the press and to the Senators and Congressmen whom I met. Unlike the US, Britain had to cope with the poisonous legacy of socialism — nationalization, trade union power, a deeply rooted anti-enterprise culture. Labour’s prices and incomes policy, combined with lax monetary policies, had greatly increased the inevitable
difficulty of transition, as the public sector pay explosion forced up state spending. At one meeting, Senator Jesse Helms said that some of the US media were playing a requiem for my Government. I was able to reassure him that news of a requiem for my policies was premature. There was always a period during an illness when the medicine was more unpleasant than the disease, but you should not stop taking the medicine. I said that I felt there was a deep recognition among the British people that my policies were right.

After another short talk over coffee with the President, at which we were joined by Nancy and Denis, my party left Washington for New York. In the afternoon I had talks with Dr Waldheim, the UN Secretary-General, and then that evening spoke to an audience on the subject of ‘the Defence of Freedom’. In my speech I summed up my feelings of cautious optimism about the decade now opening up before us:

On 20 May 1980 I had held a meeting to consider a subject which the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had belatedly placed near the top of the western international agenda — how to prevent Soviet expansion in the developing world. With a revivified United States, the possibilities had now been transformed. But I never doubted that, over and above the role of ally and friend to the United States, there was much that Britain could achieve and that no one else could. The Left would have it that the legacy of the British empire was one of bitterness and impoverishment in the former colonies: this was a grossly distorted and inaccurate view. Nor for the most part did those with whom I dealt in these countries see Britain in that light. Sweep away some of the rhetoric and with the exception of certain issues, like relations with South Africa, you will find that no country is as trusted in every continent as Britain. In 1981 I began to make more systematic use of
these relationships to promote the interests of Britain and the wider objectives of the West.