Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (109 page)

The summit itself, however, laid the foundations for a good working relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald. Although she was rather sour about FitzGerald in her memoirs, possibly retaliating for his criticisms of her in his, she did, at this time, like him, inclining to Nigel Lawson’s view that he was ‘the only completely honest Taoiseach the Republic have ever had’.
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At the top of the draft communiqué, she wrote out the adjectives she would use to describe the meeting: ‘Friendly, constructive, practical’. But, after her experience at Dublin, she was extremely anxious about the precise wording of the communiqué, and asked for the advice of Ian Gow (Gow reminded her: ‘We both remember what the Foreign Office did to us last time!’).
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Gow’s wholly Unionist suggestions, many contributed by Enoch Powell, did not carry the day, but Mrs Thatcher did succeed in rejecting a draft which said that the British government would ‘support’ movement to a United Ireland if the majority in the North so wished, and replaced it with the word ‘accept’.
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In the House of Commons, defending the communiqué, she made much of the fact that FitzGerald had publicly accepted the principle of consent in relation to the North. But she was assailed by Unionists who feared the implications of the new Council and the Joint Studies. One asked her if she still stood ‘rock firm’ for the Union, as she had said in Belfast three years previously. ‘Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom,’ she replied, ‘as much as my constituency is.’
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This was altered, in mythology, to a claim that Ulster was ‘as British as Finchley’, but this was not quite what she was saying. She was not asserting, and did not believe, that Northern Ireland and north London were culturally the same. Rather, she was defending the constitutional position, and the rights of the people protected by it.

On 11 November 1981, four of the five Joint Studies were published, the report on security matters being excluded. The first report on the ‘possible new institutional structures’ proposed the formation of the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Council. Although the precise nature and powers of the Council remained vague, the two countries agreed to set up a secretariat to run the Council. It was this idea of a permanent secretariat which made Unionists uneasy, then and later. Events quickly distracted attention from
the Joint Studies. Three days later, an Official Unionist MP, the Revd Robert Bradford, was assassinated by the IRA. Gow reported to Mrs Thatcher the view of leading Unionists that ‘The whole place is a tinderbox’
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and that, to the majority, talk of a ‘political solution’ sounded like incorporation in the Irish Republic. At Bradford’s funeral, Jim Prior was jostled by angry mourners. His remedy for the situation was to pursue devolution once more, and he tried to sell the idea to Mrs Thatcher. She remained unconvinced, and read across from Northern Ireland to the mainland: ‘My main worry about devolved government is the effect it would have on
Scotland
. Further I see little prospect of sufficient agreement to secure an
effective
devolution.’
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Although Prior devised what he called ‘rolling devolution’ by which powers would be devolved by agreed stages, the problems were very much the same as they had been with Atkins – that the Nationalists insisted on power-sharing and the Unionists on the rights of the majority. He presented his ideas to OD in February 1982. Mrs Thatcher covered his draft with wiggly lines, and Gow wrote to her in passionate terms, reminding her of the government’s manifesto pledge and the legacy of Airey Neave. He ridiculed power-sharing: ‘To seek to combine Republicans and Unionists in the same power-sharing Executive is as absurd as asking Petain and De Gaulle to sit in the same Cabinet in 1940.’ Prior’s plans were ‘moving in fundamentally the wrong direction’ and were ‘doomed to failure’. With a frankness which showed that he knew his boss would not be horrified at the idea of undermining the proposals, Gow wrote: ‘I fear that the Government, which is on the whole disinterested in Northern Ireland, will back Jim’s proposals. It may be that the best way of preventing this initiative is the absence of Parliamentary time this Session …’
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The Prior proposals were much disputed within the government, and OD Committee failed to reach agreement on them. When they came back, revised, towards the end of March, the White Paper proposed, under the heading of ‘Bilateral Arrangements’, a role for the Republic, via the Council and its inter-parliamentary arm, in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Gow then told Mrs Thatcher, in effect, that he would have to resign if Prior’s plans were to become law: ‘I well understand what the consequences would be, but I do not see how I can vote for the Second Reading of a Bill which I consider would be gravely damaging to Northern Ireland and to the unity of this Kingdom.’
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Mrs Thatcher was in a quandary. She more or less agreed with Gow, and was worried about dissension within her party. Equally, she had put Prior in Northern Ireland so that each could leave the other alone; and she was warned by Armstrong, probably correctly, that Prior’s ‘personal position’ would be ‘very difficult’ if his proposals were
rejected.
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She knew, too, that the majority of the Cabinet tended to side with Prior. Even after further revisions, the White Paper alarmed her, and in Cabinet on 1 April 1982 she continued to tone down phrases, which she called ‘devastating’, about the co-operation of the British and Irish Parliaments.
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But she felt she had to let the Bill go ahead. Somehow, perhaps by a few kind words, perhaps by quietly authorizing him to foment rebellion, she had squared Ian Gow. On 2 April, he wrote to her: ‘The die is now cast, but you understand, and
thank
you for understanding, how difficult my position is. I cannot forget Airey.’
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The day after the Cabinet had agreed the Prior Bill, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.
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The crisis enabled Mrs Thatcher to order the postponement of the Bill, though not the publication of the White Paper, until after Easter. The delay helped Gow, now more essential than ever to Mrs Thatcher because of his skill at shoring up her position in the House of Commons. But there was a sense in which it helped Prior too. Faced with a battle for the very survival of her government, of national honour, of her whole career, she had little time for anything else. True, Gow had Mrs Thatcher’s licence to cause trouble for Prior. Leading Unionist Tories such as Nick Budgen,
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who resigned as a whip, and Lord Cranborne,
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who resigned as a PPS, protested against the Bill. To quell revolt, the whips decided to guillotine the Bill. Jim Prior recalled his chief’s reaction: ‘I always remember when I told the Cabinet that we were going to have to guillotine it. She turned to me and said, “Thank God I am going to be in the United States and am not going to have to vote for it.” I mean, she didn’t make my life easy.’
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In the event, twenty-six Conservative backbenchers voted against the guillotine motion. Mrs Thatcher probably had it in her power to prevent the passage of the Bill, but she chose not to do so. It was enough for her purposes to indicate her displeasure, and then let it pass.

The Falklands also had the effect of freezing Anglo-Irish relations.
Charles Haughey, who continued to believe that Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour during the hunger strikes had lost him the election in the summer of 1981, had returned to power on 9 March 1982. He saw the Falklands as the chance for revenge. In the EEC and at the United Nations, Ireland became by far the most awkward Western European country, voting against sanctions on Argentina and for UN resolutions advancing an Argentine agenda.
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Already opposed to the Prior proposals because his government had had no involvement in them, Haughey did what he could to throw a spanner in the works. Sean Aylward, his private secretary at the time, explained: ‘Now I don’t think it was his finest hour … but it did pose policy difficulties … because quite simply the Falklands/Malvinas was a classic piece of colonial history [and therefore problematic in Irish politics] … it was a combination of substantial sympathy in Ireland for the Argentinian position and the smouldering resentment of the way in which the Thatcher government had influenced the hunger strikes that influenced our foreign policy at the time. Retrospectively, there is no question that it was a mistake because it simply wasn’t understood in England and we lost a lot of friends too.’
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At the end of May, Figg, the British Ambassador in Dublin, had an uncomfortable meeting with Haughey. The Taoiseach told him that the ‘spirit of the Anglo-Irish Initiative’ was ‘quite dead’ because of the failure to consult Dublin.
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Unlike her officials, Mrs Thatcher did not mind that the Irish government had withdrawn from political partnership. In answer to a question from Enoch Powell, she told the House of Commons, almost with glee, that ‘no commitment exists for Her Majesty’s Government to consult the Irish Government on matters affecting Northern Ireland. That has always been our position. We reiterate and emphasise it, so that everyone is clear about it.’
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But she minded very much indeed that the Irish had tried to impede British victory in the Falklands. In a discussion about improving reciprocal voting rights that had been rumbling on for some time, Armstrong wrote to her, implicitly rebuking her for her reluctance to press forward and reminding her that reform was a British commitment. Mrs Thatcher’s pen scribbled back: ‘I am aware of this – but events have changed matters since then. Certainly I have no intention of having further bilateral
meetings with the Taoiseach.’
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Her patience with the whole subject of Ireland, and particularly with the Republic, was temporarily exhausted. When the elections for Prior’s Assembly were held on 20 October 1982, her fears about the process were confirmed. Sinn Fein shot up to 10 per cent of the first-preference votes, a third, in other words, of the votes on the Nationalist side.

Ian Gow hoped to turn Mrs Thatcher’s frustration with Northern Ireland to the advantage of his Unionist allies. Writing to the Prime Minister in mid-November, he told her, ‘After the next General Election, I hope that you might find it possible to make a really fresh start with our policy in the Province.’ The ‘present combination of Prior and Gowrie’, he continued, ‘is doing great damage to Ulster’.
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Mrs Thatcher, however, was soon exposed to other influences. Early in December 1982 she gave a dinner for Lord Shackleton, to thank him for his work on restoring the economy of the Falkland Islands. Afterwards, she invited a couple of officials up for a drink. One of them, David Goodall,
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Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, and a Roman Catholic of Irish descent with a long-standing commitment to Anglo-Irish rapprochement, turned the conversation to Ireland. Rather boldly, he told her that it was a ‘scandal’ that British troops, though triumphant in the Falklands, were still being lost in anger within the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister and he talked about Irishness. ‘I am completely English,’ said Mrs Thatcher, stoutly. ‘I’m not,’ said Goodall; ‘both my grandfathers were Irish.’ ‘Actually,’ said the Prime Minister, reflectively, ‘my great-grandmother was a Sullivan,
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so I’m one-sixteenth Irish.’ She mused a little. ‘If we get back [after the next general election],’ she said, ‘I should like to do something about Ireland.’
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Because ‘success has many fathers and failure is an orphan’, the paternity, or indeed maternity, of the 1981 Budget is hotly disputed. The politicians, including Mrs Thatcher, who were trying to agree the Budget were in the middle of a crisis, wrestling with figures that seemed to get worse every day. They were so worried by the possible result that they strove for a situation in which disaster could not be pinned on them. It was only afterwards, when the Budget came to look like a triumph, that they began to claim authorship. As it approached, it threatened to be the climactic disaster of her premiership.

At the Chequers meeting of 17 January 1981, the desperate state of the economy had become clear to Mrs Thatcher and her closest advisers. To date, the government had failed to stem the relentless rise in public expenditure, and a funding crisis, with the potential to bring down the government, seemed a real possibility. Following this meeting, therefore, debate turned urgently to the need for a severe Budget to bring the PSBR under control. ‘In the early stages of talk about a tough Budget,’ Terry Burns remembered, ‘Mrs Thatcher was quite nervous about it.’
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John Hoskyns, Alan Walters and David Wolfson felt that they could not make Mrs Thatcher focus on the problems. She seemed tired and cross: when she appeared, the next day, not to remember a late-night meeting, Hoskyns noted in his diary: ‘Oh dear! I think she’d had one or two drinks on an empty stomach.’
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On 10 February, after a meeting with Mrs Thatcher and Howe at which the PSBR was now forecast at £13 billion, Walters sent the Prime Minister a note warning what would happen if the Budget were not tough enough: ‘The trend of the forecasts of PSBR is upwards – and, by the nature of extrapolative forecasts, they are unlikely to undershoot … We are likely therefore to budget for too low a reduction in PSBR (as we did in 1980/81).’ Walters went on: ‘This will lead either to an additional late summer or autumn budget (which is to be avoided) or to putting great strain on funding. This last
may
lead to a funding crisis,
but it certainly will lead to high interest rates, retaining high exchange rates and yet another squeeze on the private sector. This outcome must be avoided – it would be a quite impossible scenario for the approach to an election.’ He called for ‘painful decisions now’.
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