John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
Margaret. It was a warning that should have been noticed.
Geoffrey, whatever his private feelings, went out of his way to help me settle in at the Foreign Office. We met for what was intended to be a briefing but turned out simply to be a friendly chat. It was an odd encounter: the man who had loved the job wishing good luck to the man who did not want it. But he was supportive in public and in private – the perfect predecessor. If he felt any rancour, it was not directed at me.
I found the Foreign Office a revelation. Patrick Wright, the genial Permanent Secretary, went out of his way to be helpful. The officials were very high-calibre, and so was my ministerial team, all of whom, except William Waldegrave, were new to the Foreign Office. And yet whole forests were felled to produce long, comprehensive, written briefings. The professionalism was impressive, but it seemed to me that even trivial matters were sent to the foreign secretary for his decision, or simply to keep him informed. The Foreign Office was far more hierarchical than the Treasury.
Within days of my arrival I decided to devolve decision-making. In this I had the energetic support of Stephen Wall, who was a tower of strength, and Patrick Wright. My ministers William Waldegrave, Francis Maude, Tim Sainsbury, Ivon Brabazon and my old friend Lynda Chalker were perfectly capable of taking decisions on all sorts of matters without reference upwards. William Waldegrave had a brilliant academic mind, and was often talked of as a future prime minister. He had a phenomenal breadth of knowledge, but his intellect was not invariably an asset: it did not always equip him to understand the hopes and fears of lesser minds. Francis Maude was another with a first-class brain. He doesn’t just look at things, he looks behind them. With Francis, there was no doubt that he had the ambition to sustain his ability. Lynda Chalker, whom I’d known since she was seventeen, was to become something of a legendary figure in sub-Saharan Africa, where they adored her, and called her the Great White Mother. I remember her shaking her finger at Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, who was towering above her, holding a fly whisk.
I wanted to clear the decks for the big issues – especially Europe – that I knew I would soon have to face. I soon realised that the Foreign Office was very bruised and hurt by the open contempt in which it believed the Prime Minister held it – too many of her private bons mots had been reported back. I thought it ironic that the Prime Minister who so admired many individuals in the department should be so suspicious of it as an institution.
But I also soon saw why Mrs Thatcher felt as she did. Papers would be prepared in support of a recommendation, setting out facts which it was thought the Prime Minister would like, but omitting others which it was thought she would not. Charles Powell would of course swiftly rumble this tactic and assume that the Foreign Office was trying to hoodwink him and his boss. I stepped in at once, and personally altered any papers I considered at fault in this respect. From then on there was far less trouble between the Foreign Office and Number 10.
Treasury briefs, which concern the hard facts of finance, came easily to me, since I have always had a facility for absorbing figures. Briefs at the Foreign Office were different. They were about themes, and were less precise than economic papers. I did not immediately find them as easy to absorb as those I had been used to. It was said subsequently that during my time at the Foreign Office I did not like handling several issues at once. This was absurd. I had done that at the Treasury as a matter of course, and would do so later as prime minister. What I did not like was being asked to approve documents twenty times a day without having the time to digest them and consider their impact on policy. I did not like receiving bits of paper with a few scraps of generalised information and a request for a decision. I would say repeatedly, ‘I don’t know the background 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