John Major: The Autobiography. John Major
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 did not know my reasoning, since she did not ask me about it. I did not know of her reservations, since she didn’t tell me about them.
Neither did I know that she had asked Charles Powell to draft a second statement, making plain our views as distinct from our reservations about the majority view. I was content with that. Charles set to in robust fashion. The heads of government had retired to the island retreat of Langkawi – reports came back that Margaret spent her lunchtime feeding Benazir Bhutto’s fifteen-month-old baby, while Denis complained of the cold (the temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit) and repaired to the bar for comfort.
When we saw Charles’s text, Stephen Wall added some preliminary sentences to stress areas in which the communiqué made progress, and on that basis I was content for it to go forward. I was unaware of the dispute that had taken place on Langkawi over the foreign ministers’ draft, or that, in the words of Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada, our Commonwealth partners had ‘watered their wine’ to accommodate Margaret Thatcher. Nor, in my innocence, did I realise the extent to which the issuing of a separate statement breached normal procedure. Even if I had, I would have seen no reason why we should not express our own view. I did, though, see the risk that the second statement would be seen as a rift between myself and the Prime Minister, and for that reason asked for it to be issued as a joint statement.
The statement provoked two huge rows. The first, soon disposed of, was in the Heads of Government Meeting. ‘How could Mrs Thatcher sign an agreement at 5 p.m. and repudiate it at 6 p.m.?’ was the charge. Our view was that we stood by the agreement, but had added to it the reasons for our open and stated dissent to part of it. In fact, this irritable but perfectly straightforward squabble between heads of government suited everyone, because it enabled all concerned to peddle their views to their own domestic audiences. They all saw the advantage of that, and did so with gusto.
The second row had wider domestic impact. I had briefed the British press in very upbeat fashion about the communiqué I had agreed. They were grumpy and disgruntled that a novice foreign secretary had robbed them of a spectacular row at a boring conference. Unfortunately Bernard Ingham’s initial briefing of the press was done in a rush – like the rest of us, he was catching up with the new draft – and delivered with characteristic Inghamesque brutality. It involved him more or less reading out a confidential letter from Charles reporting on the discussion on Langkawi, and recording the Prime Minister saying she did not much like the foreign ministers’ text.
This was taken as a criticism of me, and was manna from heaven for the press. Ever eager for drama, they presented it as Mrs Thatcher disowning my negotiations, slapping me down and embarrassing me. The new boy on the block was being put in his place. There was some flavour of this in questions put to me at my press conference, but since I knew the Prime Minister did not intend to undermine me I did not allow it to worry me.
As I flew home, a day earlier than Mrs Thatcher since I had questions to answer in the Commons, I reflected on my first three months as foreign secretary. I was tired but reasonably satisfied. I thought I had made some solid gains. I was now infinitely better informed on foreign policy. I was comfortable and confident with bilaterals, and prepared to take on all comers. I had re-established relations with China after Tiananmen Square and was moving towards doing so with Argentina. I had staked out a pragmatic position on Europe and was getting the measure of how the EEC worked. I had weathered difficult confrontations at the Commonwealth Conference and felt the substance had gone well.
When I arrived at the Spelthorne Suite at Heathrow, however, I realised I was being complacent. The press were playing up the supposed row at CHOGM for all it was worth and more; the damage being done was evident. I licked my wounds and prepared to be more careful the next time Margaret and I travelled abroad together.
But there was to be no next time. After ninety-four days my brief tenure as foreign secretary would come to an end.
CHAPTER SEVEN An Ambition Fulfilled
ON 26 OCTOBER 1989, after the Prime Minister had delivered her Commons statement on the Kuala Lumpur conference, she turned to me on the front bench and invited me to join her for tea in her room behind the Speaker’s Chair. I assumed she wanted to make peace after the fuss over the foreign ministers’ communiqué. Though she never apologised, she could be extraordinarily friendly to colleagues to whom she had caused trouble, sometimes treating them to an informal chat about politics in the stream-of-consciousness way she so enjoyed when she was relaxing. This, however, was to be no such cosy occasion. She had a bombshell to drop.
We had no sooner settled on the sofas in her room than she said without preamble: ‘Nigel is going to resign and I might want you as chancellor.’
This was startling news, with political implications which shocked me even as the drama stirred my blood. ‘When?’ I asked.
‘Today,’ she said.
So far so clear, but the question in my mind was ‘Why?’ The strains between the Prime Minister and her chancellor were well enough known. Equally, however, I had noted in Cabinet how she generally supported Nigel, and sometimes even deferred to him – behaviour so out of character that it was, perhaps, an attempt at peacemaking, though I had not viewed it as such. She certainly never treated him in the cavalier, intolerant and often discourteous style she displayed towards Geoffrey Howe – whose forbearance,