John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
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 sometimes do good by stealth. If I had stated publicly some of my reasons for agreeing to the meeting, I would have raised more fears than I quelled. Would people have been reassured to hear me say that our anxiety to restore world confidence in Hong Kong was in order to stave off financial paralysis, or would it have helped to bring about precisely that paralysis? Similarly, if I had said I wished to prevent the Chinese army from misbehaving in Hong Kong as they had done in Tiananmen Square, would that have reassured Hong Kong’s inhabitants, or the reverse? And would not such undiplomatic public musings have put at risk any worthwhile dialogue with China, as well as damaging British business interests? With these thoughts in my mind I returned from Paris and began to read myself seriously into my Foreign Office brief. I had no doubt that I could master the job of foreign secretary, but I was acutely aware of how poorly prepared by experience I was for this role. Once more I had a tremendous amount to learn.
As the summer parliamentary recess began I returned to Finings to pore over briefing papers, until Tristan Garel-Jones suggested I decamped with my family to his house in Spain, a beautiful property on the plain beneath the Gredos mountains which would provide perfect peace in lovely weather. ‘It’s very quiet,’ said Tristan. ‘You can sit in the shade and work and everyone else can get a suntan. I’m not going – it’s too hot for me in August.’ I accepted gladly, and went with Norma, Elizabeth and James, Robert Atkins, the MP for South Ribble, his wife Dulcie and their two children, and a suitcase full of briefings.
From dawn to dusk, interrupted only by meals, the occasional chat, cricket scores from home, early-evening gin and tonic, and Robert complaining about the heat (it was indeed very hot), I read and read and read. Never had I crammed so hard, as I absorbed the patterns of Britain’s relations with – and interests in – every part of the world. Fortunately for me, I have always been a fast reader, taking in the words in chunks rather than lines; on an ordinary holiday I get through at least a novel a day. Now, as the complex jigsaw came together, I became more and more enthusiastic about the opportunity I had been given. I so enjoyed reading myself into the new subject that the days flew by, and the joy of learning, the sense that it had a real purpose and that it was widening my horizons, was so great that, for the only time in my life, I rather regretted not having gone to university. I think I would have enjoyed it.
Shortly after my return from Spain I joined the Prime Minister in a ‘mini-summit’ at Chequers with President Mitterrand of France and his Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas. My talks with Roland were a sideshow, but they highlighted disagreements between the UK and France over social policy and European monetary union (EMU) that were to grow over the years. The French favoured a European social policy. We did not. I believed that European involvement would increase regulation, drive up costs and raise unemployment. I also believed it was for the British Parliament to decide upon such issues in Britain. These became familiar themes for me in future years, but were never accepted by the French.
Further differences were also obvious over the Delors Report on how the European Community could move to economic and monetary union. The full implications of Delors were still being debated, but the thrust was clear, and was unwelcome to the British government on economic and political grounds. I told Dumas, ‘Apart from the desirability of a single currency, the problems of persuading public and parliamentary opinion would be acute.’ For good measure I added that a single central bank was alien to our tradition of having interest rates set by the chancellor of the exchequer.
But these differences were not matters for immediate decision, and the five hours of talks were a success both at my level and between the two heads of government. The Prime Minister and President Mitterrand were very different characters, and it was enlivening to watch them in tandem. Both were unmistakable representatives of their nations: François Mitterrand could only have been a Frenchman, and Margaret Thatcher an Englishwoman. For that reason it was a fascinating contrast. Each performed in turn while the other watched admiringly and waited to get back to centre stage. It was not so much a meeting as a flirtation, which they both clearly enjoyed. Mitterrand was supposed to have said that the Prime Minister had ‘les yeux de Caligula et la bouche de Marilyn Monroe’. Years later, when I put this to him, he denied it, but it seemed in character, and having seen them together at the time, brilliantly apt.
Where they disagreed they circled one another warily, but did not follow the disagreement to a conclusion. When the Prime Minister set out our objections to the Social Chapter she did so crisply, making it clear that she saw it as an attempt to drag industry’s costs in other European countries up to German levels. When the President responded he went out of his way to say that, while he favoured the Charter, he did not have the same goals as Germany. Thus was confrontation between Britain and France avoided by a mutual expression of disapproval of the Germans. It was like watching two master chefs taking turns to carve up the same piece of meat. These exchanges served their purpose on the day, but only at a price. I was to learn later that Helmut Kohl was well aware of such exchanges, and that they caused real damage