worse than the Russians’.
One meeting was unexpected. I had intended to invite the Egyptian Foreign Minister for a bilateral at the United Nations Plaza Hotel. Unfortunately one of our officials misread the telephone number in the Directory of Delegations, and invited the Foreign Minister of Ethiopia. As our relations with Ethiopia were decidedly chilly at the time, this gentleman was startled but accepted immediately. When he was met at the lift by Crispin Tickell and Stephen Wall, the penny dropped immediately. ‘Oh God,’ said Crispin. ‘It’s the Ethiopian. I know him. It’s the wrong man.’
Our unwelcome guest was shuttled into a side room while I was given a quick primer on Ethiopia. He was then hustled in for a twenty-minute meeting from which he departed with a look of extreme bewilderment. A few years before, I am told, the Foreign Office summoned an equally bewildered East German Ambassador to a meeting, in place of his West German counterpart.
It was at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool in October that I emerged from relative obscurity as Chief Secretary of the Treasury to the full glare of my new position. This was not the first time I had addressed the conference, but it was my debut as a Cabinet minister. Anti-European feeling in the party was becoming stronger. One young girl got tremendous applause when she said that, at the age of nineteen, she knew more about what was good for the UK than a sixty-year-old fuddy-duddy like Jacques Delors. The pro-Europe former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, then Vice-Chairman of the European Commission, who was only half-attending on the platform, joined in the applause, but I don’t think he can have heard her remarks. If the Prime Minister had announced that she was taking us out of the EEC the majority of those in the hall would have cheered her to the echo.
It was against this background that I put forward the government’s European policy. Here is what I said, well before I was prime minister, and in view of all that has taken place since I make no apology for repeating it:
I am not someone who believes in Europe right or wrong. We must judge it on its merits. But a clear-eyed look at Britain’s national interest shows beyond doubt that we have benefited from Community membership … Fifty years ago, Europe was full of young people with knapsacks going off to fight. Now it is full of young people with haversacks going off on holiday. That is a better Europe …
Today, I would not change a word of that speech. Nor would I change what I said about economic and monetary union.
It means different things to different people … So far, the discussion has centred on only one set of ideas. They would involve an end to national currencies, to independent national central banks and to national control over fiscal policy … We can’t accept these ideas but there are other ideas to discuss and we will put them forward.
We did, but alas, as time has shown, we were too late.
At CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur later that month, South Africa and the question of sanctions were the main sources of conflict, as we knew they would be. The UK opposed sanctions, believing them to be counterproductive. Everyone else supported them. There was no natural meeting point.
Margaret Thatcher tried to head off the expected trouble. She met Dr Mahathir, the Malaysian Prime Minister and Chairman of the Conference, on the eve of the first session, urging that South Africa should not dominate the discussion. Her hopes, never strong, were not realised. Mahathir’s silence was more expressive than any reply.
On the first morning of conference, Margaret Thatcher – incensed at remarks made by other heads of government about South Africa at the formal opening – quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a figure known worldwide as an opponent of apartheid, on the perverse effect of sanctions. It was an effective, almost irresistible, debating point, but it was very provocative. Battle was joined. As the conference proceeded there was no sign of a conciliatory mood on policy towards South Africa, and a drafting committee of foreign ministers was set up to paper over our differences and agree a communiqué.
It met on 20 October, and was fairly bloody. There was dispute on nearly every sentence, and much of the discussion was emotional. I was utterly isolated, and was fighting on two fronts: to keep out the prejudicial wording proposed by others, and to retain the British view in the communiqué against opposition from every other foreign minister. The meeting became very bad-tempered despite all that Joe Clark, the Foreign Minister of Canada and Chairman of the group, did to keep it in order. The disagreement with the African and Asian foreign ministers was blunt, but the clashes with Gareth Evans from Australia were altogether rougher. We had clashed pre-conference when he had tried to bounce me into a meeting with leaders of the African National Congress, when our policy at that time was not to meet them. I had declined, and he had been very sore about it. ‘You’ve got your script, but you’ve turned up for the wrong bloody play,’ he yelled at one point.
In the drafting group our positions on sanctions were diametrically opposed. As each line was fought over the atmosphere became more sulphurous, and it spread to involve the other participants. When I queried the title of the Southern African section of the communiqué (‘Southern Africa – The Way Forward’), Gareth said, ‘Oh, I suppose you want to call it “Southern Africa – The Way Backwards”.’ There was a lot more gratuitous and sometimes rather light-hearted abuse. At one stage Gareth was so infuriated by an amendment from the Zimbabwean Foreign Minister, Nathan Shamiyurira, that he threw his draft to the floor, exclaiming, ‘It’s not the f***ing Koran.’ I swear the Muslims went pale. The Malaysian Foreign Minister drew the edge of his hand across his throat, and for a few moments I enjoyed the luxury of having some allies.
Eventually at 1 a.m., after sixteen hours of hand-to-hand verbal combat, a text was agreed in which, in four separate places, I set out Britain’s disagreement with the majority view. Reasonably satisfied that it was the best we could have done, I went to bed; but not before a piece of foolishness I later regretted. Tired and weary, I was overheard saying that Gareth Evans’s behaviour was ‘an example of the Les Patterson school of diplomacy’. Inevitably this was picked up and heavily featured in Australia. The remark was unfair, because in fact Gareth had made many skilful drafting amendments that helped mask our conflicting positions.
Over breakfast the next morning with Patrick Wright, Patrick Fair-weather, the Under-Secretary for Commonwealth Affairs, and Stephen Wall, I reviewed the outcome. I suggested that some of the black African states who benefited from trade with South Africa were being hypocritical in calling themselves the ‘front-line states’, and that we should tackle them about it. The two Patricks stared thoughtfully at their cornflakes. Stephen, who knew me better than them, simply remarked that if I did, ‘they’ll think you’re completely loopy’. He did not believe in holding back if he saw trouble ahead.
That day the text hammered out by the foreign ministers was placed before the heads of government for agreement. Some members of the Commonwealth felt that it was not severe enough on South Africa, and said so, but Margaret Thatcher proposed that it should be adopted without amendment, and this duly took place.
These proceedings were my first direct experience of the unbridgeable gap between the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth over South Africa, and I found them very frustrating. I loathed apartheid, but did not believe sanctions were an effective way of hastening its end. I thought they were mere window-dressing – and harmful with it; they simply hurt the poorest black South Africans. ‘I want to satisfy empty black African bellies in South Africa, not liberal consciences outside it,’ I said at a press briefing.
The Prime Minister was a veteran of such disputes, and was increasingly fed up by them. She approved of my reservations on the agreed statement but, as I learned later, felt I had missed one – namely the statement that sanctions were not intended to be punitive. I had accepted this because I thought it was an important admission by the other Commonwealth states which we could use as an argument against any proposal from them for comprehensive sanctions. Margaret Thatcher
