to this. I’d like to know it before I agree anything.’ I would then speak to the officials, however junior, who could brief me in full. I have never been happy with superficial explanations. I have never been prepared just to wave things through.
I soon began to acclimatise myself. I discovered, rather unexpectedly, that the skills I needed as foreign secretary were very similar to those I had honed at the Treasury: an ability to prevail in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations without humiliating one’s opponent; and to make a dispassionate judgement of what could be achieved in the long term.
As I settled into the job I became more enthusiastic about it. I was frustrated that routine meetings with ambassadors and high commissioners took up so much time, although I was frequently told that Geoffrey had loved them. Nor did I view all the invitations to banquets and similar functions with any real eagerness – the only thing I enjoyed less than banquets were G7 summits.
Policy, though, was a different matter. There was a large field to play on, and the prospect was one I relished. And foreign-policy decisions cast a long shadow. Within a day of arriving at the Foreign Office I had to advise the Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet (OD) whether or not to permit the export of British Aerospace’s Hawk aircraft to Iraq. It was an attractive and lucrative sale which would be worth £1 billion initially and up to £3 billion over time, with up to 230 sub-contractors benefiting.
The MoD were in favour of the sale, and although they fairly set out the objections to it, they believed it could be justified within the guidelines for arms sales. I did not. The trainer version of Hawk could easily be adapted to carry all kinds of weapons, including chemical weapons, and would have been a wicked instrument if used – as I feared it would have been – for internal repression of Iraq’s Kurds. Nor was I alone in that fear. MPs including Labour’s Ann Clwyd and Jeremy Corbyn had already focused attention on human rights in Iraq, and had been well justified in doing so. I was clear that we should not sell Hawk trainers to Iraq, and warned Number 10 of the line I would take at OD.
Mrs Thatcher opened the discussion, as was her wont. She supported the argument she knew I was going to put, and no one in Cabinet said a word against her. There was no need. My recommendation was clear, and the Prime Minister’s support was absolute. Everyone agreed that the sale should not go ahead. The Cabinet were not in favour of tyrants, or of selling weapons of repression to them. It was ironic that later we were to be accused of exporting arms to Iraq, since when Cabinet had the opportunity to do so it had refused.
Other issues were pressing for solution worldwide. The Soviet empire was collapsing. We had to consider aid for the new non-Communist government in Poland. We needed to re-establish relations with Argentina after the Falklands War. The Commonwealth Conference lay ahead, with inevitable ructions about South Africa. The European Community was gearing up for more integration. The Vietnamese boat people – 150,000 of them crowded into camps in Hong Kong, and still arriving – were a human as well as an international problem. Meanwhile three British citizens – Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Jackie Mann – had already been held hostage in Lebanon for over two thousand days.
For myself, the most immediate concern was a twenty-nation peace conference convened to discuss Cambodia and due to open in Paris on 30 July, less than a week after I had taken up office. Its primary objective was to prevent the Khmer Rouge, responsible under their murderous leader Pol Pot for the slaughter of untold numbers of Cambodians, from wielding any further power. The British were peripheral players in this drama, and had limited expectations of the outcome. But the conference, which of course marked my debut on the international scene, was an excellent introduction to the diplomatic circuit. Diplomacy is the oil that smoothes the movement of states from incompatible positions towards compromise. It has its own language, its own nuance. Stamina and patience are essential. Realism and oratory are both in demand, though frequently also in conflict. It has a fascination all its own if you can develop a high threshold of tolerance for frustration and – sometimes – hypocrisy in a worthy cause.
An essential component of any gathering of foreign ministers is bilateral discussion – that is, a meeting confined to two principals accompanied only by their top aides. At Paris, with my ‘L’ plates still fresh, I had two of significance.
The first was with Jim Baker, the US Secretary of State and a close ally of President Bush. I had not met him before, and I wished to resolve a dispute that was poisoning the atmosphere between our two countries over the Vietnamese boat people. More than thirty-one thousand had arrived in Hong Kong within the year, and around three hundred a day were sailing into the colony. Genuine refugees were being found homes around the world, but economic migrants, who were not refugees, were the nub of the problem. Camps had been set up to house them, but the conditions were wretched and worsening. Hong Kong could not cope. An international conference in Geneva had agreed that non-refugees should be returned home, but ducked the question of what to do with those who refused to do so. The British government believed that if we could not persuade economic migrants to return to Vietnam voluntarily, we would have no practical alternative but to return them by force. Hong Kong was demanding action this day, but the US wanted us to hold off.
It was a difficult meeting. Jim Baker was forceful and direct by nature, and our disagreements were expressed in plain English. I liked his approach, which I learned was typical of his exchanges with us – and of ours with him. Britain and America’s community of interests and outlook generally made it possible to bypass diplomatic niceties and speedily deal with substance, and to some extent this was so now. Not entirely, however. We ended the meeting better informed about each other’s reservations, but neither of us had changed his policy.
In Paris I also inherited from Geoffrey’s diary a controversial meeting with Qian Qichen, the Chinese Foreign Minister. This was the first contact between the British and the Chinese since the bloody events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square only a few weeks earlier, when hundreds of pro-democracy student demonstrators were mown down or crushed beneath the wheels of Chinese army tanks. The brutality of the Chinese government’s repressive action had shocked the whole world, but in particular the vulnerable inhabitants of Hong Kong, who were due to see their territory revert to Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997. The instrument of the transfer was the Joint Declaration signed by Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe in September 1984, and the target of much criticism and misunderstanding since. In fact, they had been negotiating from a position of hopeless weakness, since Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories would expire on the legal date anyway, and it was widely believed that it would not be possible for Hong Kong and the Kowloon peninsula to remain British without the New Territories on the Chinese mainland. The only point at issue was whether the handover would take place with an agreement or without one. Whether the traditional open way of life in Hong Kong would be allowed to continue was thus entirely dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese government. Before Tiananmen Square it was possible to be optimistic. After it, trust was shattered. A mood of near despair gripped the territory. Its stock exchange fell 30 per cent, and business investment was held back. Against this background I felt that to refuse to meet the Chinese might win plaudits from the unthinking, but would in fact be no more than a piece of public-relations posturing that would remove any leverage we had to help Hong Kong. So I met Qian Qichen.
I found him a modern diplomat. A plumpish man, twinkling, undemonstrative, reflective, but arguing from a strong brief, and very conscious that his policy was made in Beijing. He was quietly inflexible. He knew the strength of China’s position in law over Hong Kong. Yet he also recognised the damage the Tiananmen Square massacre had done to his country abroad. Our meeting was civilised and relatively straightforward. Although sharp differences were registered between us, we readily identified a way ahead and established a dialogue that was to continue – albeit uncomfortably from time to time – right up to the handover in 1997. None of this, however, deflected the short-term criticism my decision to meet him provoked in the press.
What struck me at the time about this relatively unimportant episode was the extent to which governments must
