Only two curtsies today.
Her Majesty the Queen, on Mrs Thatcher
It was evident to all, including Her Majesty, that Margaret Thatcher would happily have abandoned the Commonwealth to pursue a special relationship with the United States, a country she greatly admired. In her opinion, the future lay not with the countries of the former British Empire, but across the Atlantic with the genial, right-wing and charming President Ronald Reagan, and Margaret set about making herself his closest political and ideological friend.
After his inauguration in January 1981, Margaret was accorded the honour of being his first foreign visitor, and the two of them bonded.1 The American alliance was central to her thinking. She viewed the United States as the pivot in the coalition against Communism. The American anti-Soviet alliance cut across all other loyalties.2
Mrs Thatcher fed the United States’ appetite for royalty by dispatching the queen and her family on a series of goodwill tours that were enthusiastically reciprocated. First lady, Nancy Reagan caught royal fever, and Thatcher fed this mania by inviting her to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Nancy arrived in London saying, ‘I’m just crazy about Prince Charles’, bringing with her twenty-six suitcases, eleven hat boxes, seventeen secret service men and a pair of borrowed earrings worth $880,000.3 The queen arranged for her cousin, Jean Willis, to host her during her visit, and Mrs Reagan also took tea with the queen mother at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. At the wedding reception, Mrs Reagan sat with the queen and Princess Grace of Monaco for the buffet supper.4
The following year, the Reagans were invited to rub shoulders again with royalty by making a state visit to Britain. It was a diplomatic ruse on both sides. For the Americans, it was the crowning moment of Reagan’s first European tour as president.
For Thatcher, it was a means of highlighting to the electorate the bond between herself and the US Presidency at a time when her ratings in the opinion polls were so low they were among the worst recorded for any sitting prime minister. Her imposition of strict monetarist economic policies, with accompanying redundancies and bankruptcies, lower taxation and low public spending, were making her extremely unpopular. She had come to power promising ‘my job is to stop Britain going into the red’, but the harshness of her policies led to riots breaking out in cities such as London, Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester, caused by unemployment, social deprivation and racial tension.
Jobless figures stood at 2.7 million, and police were battling against protestors throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets.5 Denis Healey described her policy as ‘sado-monetarism’,6 but Mrs Thatcher blamed criminals for the violence. After witnessing the destruction of property in Liverpool’s Toxteth area, she reserved her sympathy for ‘those poor shopkeepers’.7 There were doubts about her political prospects in the US press and among many Reaganites. Time magazine had published an article about her entitled ‘Embattled but Unbowed’, reporting that her government was beset with difficulties.8 Many people at home and abroad felt she wouldn’t last.
Just before Ronald Reagan was about to set foot inside Windsor Castle, an international event blew up that would test their new friendship, take the focus off domestic failures and prove to be the Iron Lady’s finest hour. On 2 April 1982, General Leopold Galtieri and his Argentinian military junta invaded the Falkland Islands.
Which side they should back was no easy call for the US to make. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, saw Galtieri as an important ally in countering the influence of Soviet and Cuban influence in South America. Galtieri had even been an early visitor to the White House, where he had met the president soon after Thatcher did. For the occasion, he had worn full military uniform with his chest emblazoned with medal ribbons.9 This couldn’t have made the timing of the presidential visit to Britain more awkward and potentially embarrassing for all sides. Mike Deaver, Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, worried that it might look bad if the president was touring Britain during a bloodbath.10 The British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson, even suggested to her that the Reagans call off their long-planned visit to Windsor Castle. Thatcher was indignant. ‘It was the queen who had invited him,’ Thatcher said. ‘Did [Henderson] not realise how rude it would be to Her Majesty for the president not to come?’11
Uppermost in Thatcher’s mind was the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden used military force to liberate the British- and French-owned Suez Canal, which had been unilaterally nationalised by Gamal Abdel Nasser. President Eisenhower demanded that Britain and France end their efforts midway through the campaign or face the deliberate undermining of the value of Britain’s currency by the US. Anglo-American relations had never fully recovered since then. Thatcher knew she had to keep the US Presidency on side and was prepared to use royal hospitality to help cement the bonds between American and Britain even further.
Ironically, Britain had almost handed over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, but procrastination and jingoism got in the way. Nicholas Ridley, a Thatcherite junior minister in the early 1980s, made no bones about the government’s desire to shed, by hook or by crook, the burden of these bleak colonial relics.12 He plainly shared Denis Thatcher’s view, expressed after a post-war visit, that the Falklands were ‘miles and miles of bugger all’.13 There was a general acceptance that the islands were in decline, the economy was stagnant, morale low and that people were leaving.14 Comedian Eddie Izzard quipped that we only needed them ‘for strategic sheep purposes’.
Thatcher had passed the Nationality Act in 1981, which was designed to deny Hong Kong Chinese the right of abode in Britain, but it also excluded 800 Falkland Islanders, nearly half the population. In diplomatic terms, the Thatcher Government was sending out signals to the Argentinians that said ‘come and take them’. There was even a confidential report containing the so-called Hong Kong solution, which suggested surrendering ownership of the islands to Argentina and having them simultaneously grant Britain a lease.15
Unlike Callaghan, who sent a naval force south in 1977, Thatcher did nothing to prove to them that she would defend the islands against attack.16 The Labour prime minister had dispatched a Royal Navy mini-task force including the nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine, HMS Dreadnought, accompanied by two frigates and two support vessels. The Foreign Secretary credited this tiny flotilla with deterring a full-scale invasion. Papers released to the National Archives show that David Owen insisted the mission be conducted in intense secrecy. Not even the crews were told where they were going. While the Argentinian Government was privately warned by the British that there was a nuclear submarine in the area, the rest of the world was unaware. The papers show a high degree of nervousness within Whitehall over the operation; not least about its legality.17 David Owen, then Foreign Secretary, explains:
We did put down a naval submarine with the rules of engagement to shoot torpedoes across them if they came in, in ’77 which we feared they might during the negotiations. It all got rather down played because Jim Callaghan claimed that it was a deterrent. It wasn’t a deterrent at all, he was wrong on that, he was just an old man who’d slightly forgotten, kidded himself and talked to MI6. But the fact is that I was in charge of that element, and it was [a] totally secret deployment because we thought we might have to do it again and again, difficult negotiations.18
However, no one expected Argentina to do anything quite so foolhardy, and when General Galtieri invaded, Thatcher was taken completely by surprise. This critical moment, more than anything else, saw the birth of her reputation for ruthless decisiveness. Shocked and angry, Mrs Thatcher launched a task force to retake the islands, 8,000 miles away in the South Atlantic, arguing that she was going to defend the islanders’ choice to be British.
‘Can we do it?’ she asked Admiral Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord.
‘We can, Prime Minister,’ said Leach. ‘If we don’t do it, if we pussyfoot … we’ll be living in a different country whose word will count for little.’19
The prime minister was determined not to ‘appease’ the Argentine dictatorship, which had seized power in 1976 and presided over the disappearance of 30,000 of its citizens, a stance that resonated strongly with the British public disheartened by years of defeatism and retreats during the 1970s. Consciously modelling herself on Churchill, she insisted that the Argentine forces must be made to withdraw for the sake of British prestige and national honour. Galtieri had wrongly gambled that she wouldn’t fight so hard, and had banked on retaking the islands to lend him a much-needed propaganda coup with which to shore up his flagging political karma at home.20
On the morning of Monday, 5 April, sixty hours after her first fighting words, the fleet sailed. ‘She felt that dictators shouldn’t just be allowed to use force to overrule the rule of law, and she felt that very passionately,’ said Cecil Parkinson, a member of her War Cabinet. ‘So from day one she was in deadly earnest that the armed forces would do their job.’21 Lord Carrington felt it was, ‘A courageous decision of hers, very courageous.’22 Some among the military brass subsequently confessed that they were looking at the prime minister and thinking, ‘How can we explain our activities to a woman?’ However, Mrs Thatcher never delayed, or denied her commanders what they wanted,23 although there was a pessimistic view at the Ministry of Defence, who believed that the British Navy wasn’t prepared for a major battle in the South Atlantic.24
Alexander Haig, then Reagan’s Secretary of State, was startled by the prime minister’s determination and urged her to compromise. At the end of the first full day of meetings with Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet, the story goes that he walked into his suite at Claridge’s, threw his jacket on a chair, and barked to an aide, ‘Get me a drink. That’s a hell of a tough lady.’25
A chill even developed between Thatcher and Reagan over the issue. Reagan sent a message to Thatcher urging her to accept the concessions the US were suggesting.26 Haig persuaded Reagan to call Thatcher and encourage her to take her place at the negotiating table. ‘Haig was bad,’ states Lord Carrington. ‘Weinberger, who was the Secretary for Defence, helped us a very great deal, but Haig was, you know, wishy-washy.’27
‘Cap Weinberger was pushing every bloody available bit of stuff our way, he had huge importance in the Falklands War,’ explains David Owen.28
Reagan found himself at the wrong end of a caustic phone conversation in which her words were ‘more forceful than friendly’.29
‘Just suppose Alaska was invaded,’ Thatcher said, and continued:
I didn’t lose some of my best ships and some of my finest lives to leave quietly under a ceasefire without the Argentinians withdrawing … Ron I’m not handing over … I’m not handing over the islands now … This is a democracy and our island, and the very worst thing for democracy would be if we failed now.30
Reagan was left stammering out the odd word, trying to break Margaret’s diatribe.31 Margaret displayed the kind of candour which, in her words, could ‘only be possible among the closest of friends. With everyone else, we’re merely nice!’32
The queen supported the prime minister’s action, not only in her role as monarch of the invaded country, but as Head of the Commonwealth. She was also in the position of being a mother. Her son, Prince Andrew, was a 22-year-old helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy, serving on the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible. There were those in government who felt that sending the prince to the Falklands was too great a risk, as he would become a natural target. The queen overruled that.
‘Mrs Thatcher was very concerned about the queen’s son,’ said Cecil Parkinson. ‘The queen made it quite clear that she did not expect her son to have any favours done, bearing in mind he was going to be a helicopter pilot which is a tricky job anyway, especially in the South Atlantic.’33 Michael Mann, the queen’s chaplain, stated she said, ‘No. He’s a serving officer. He must take his turn with the rest.’34 Although Andrew was never involved in direct combat, he flew his Sea King helicopter in a number of diversionary actions, transported troops and conducted search and rescue operations which could have put him in danger. He was once even on the deck when Exocet missiles were fired at the ship.35 When an Exocet missile hit the container vessel Atlantic Conveyor, there were excited rumours in Argentina that it was the prince’s ship Invincible which had gone down.36
Like other army families, the queen and Prince Philip watched the progress of the war on the television. Unlike the other families, she also received bulletins from Downing Street. Six days after the first British landings on the islands the queen spoke publicly about the war. ‘Before I begin I would like to say one thing, our thoughts today are with those who are in the South Atlantic and our prayers are for their success and safe return to their homes and loved ones.’ After a moment’s silence she added, ‘Ordinary life must go on.’ Alan Clark stated that:
The queen’s attitude during the Falklands War was something of a mystery to many of us. She was not nearly as forthright at the outset as one might have expected … She was also, by then, a little wary of the role that Mrs Thatcher was assuming, She was not gung-ho at all, whereas George VI would have been totally gung-ho, as so would George V; no question about that. As for Victoria, she’d have actually been at sea with the task force, stood off with Britannia.37
‘The military,’ explains David Owen:
think they have a direct line to the queen, she encourages that and to some extent she has that feeling about diplomatic service and ambassadors … So she feels a very special responsibility to them during war, and I think on the Falklands, Philip and they must have told her, and she must have understood the extraordinary risks we were taking.38
The queen, like most of the Establishment, was haunted by the ghost of Suez and the burden of history. As her former press secretary, Ron Allison, explains, ‘I think the queen would have the mixed feelings and reservations about going to war with its consequent loss of life.’39
Although the warrior queen and the real queen were not quite onside, the Falklands War served to remind the people of the traditional link between the royal family and the services. Her father, George VI, had fought at the Battle of Jutland during the First World War. Prince Philip had a hero’s record earned in the Second World War at the Battle of Matapan, and now Prince Andrew was a serving officer. For all Mrs Thatcher’s jingoism, the forces viewpoint was stated clearly by Brigadier Julian Thompson, the second-in-command of the British land forces, ‘You don’t mind dying for the queen and country, but you certainly don’t want to die for politicians.’40
The only criticism the royal family faced at this moment was over Britannia, when it was announced that the royal yacht would not be used as a hospital ship, though this was meant to be her function during wartime. These rumblings grew louder when the Canberra was taken off a cruise and sent to the South Atlantic, as hundreds of people’s holidays had to be postponed or cancelled. The official reason given was that Britannia used the wrong type of fuel and could not have been refuelled that far from home base. Many found that excuse not entirely convincing, although it was the truth.41 As journalist Philip Hall stated, ‘it is odd that such an oversight should have occurred when the Duke of Edinburgh was a frequent user of the ship and had spent twelve years in the navy.’42
On 7 June, in the middle of this conflict, the president and Nancy Reagan arrived at Windsor Castle to have a state dinner in the president’s honour in the historical St George’s Hall. The couple arrived by helicopter, and were assigned a seven-room suite in the Lancaster Tower, with two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, two bathrooms and a main sitting room with portraits of the queen’s ancestors by Hans Holbein and with sweeping views of the Long Walk in the adjoining park. It was Mrs Thatcher’s aim to buttress Reagan’s ideological sympathy for her policies with a personal relationship between the Reagans and the Windsors.43 It worked. For Reagan, the state visit to Britain was the pinnacle of a lifetime’s achievement. For Nancy, a devotee of the British royal family, to stay overnight in the castle was an experience she would treasure.44 Nancy had visited London the year before for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, when she had arrived with a retinue of twenty-eight staff (including one astrologer) and irritated the queen by insisting on an invitation to a private family party. The queen had felt the reach of America’s first lady was extending well beyond her rank, and at one point referred to her as ‘that damned woman’.45
The queen and the president both had a passion for horses and went out riding.46 For an hour, Elizabeth II and Reagan walked, trotted and cantered on their 8 mile ride. The president let it be known that he found the British Head of State ‘charming’, ‘down-to-earth’ and observed ‘she was in charge of that animal!’ The two heads of state chatted to each other like buddies, while Nancy Reagan followed behind with Prince Philip in a carriage. The British Ambassador, Nicholas Henderson, noted that the Reagan’s key image-maker and deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, ‘Invariably lit up at the prospect’ of the ride. It was very successful and a photo opportunity not to be missed, although the queen was not much amused at having to parade up and down before 100 members of the invited press, irritated that she was being used for a political context. Reagan, in a perfectly fitted sports jacket, had gone for an old-time Hollywood look which he carried off with ease.47
In a speech to both houses of Parliament on 8 June, the president spoke of the alliance of the two countries against aggression, ‘These young men fight for a cause, for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed’. Later, at the state banquet the queen stood up to toast the president, ‘Prince Philip and I are especially delighted that you have come to be our guests at Windsor Castle, since this has been the home of kings and queens of our country for over 900 years …’ She spoke of drawing comfort ‘from the understanding of our position shown by the American people’.48 The president sat next to the queen, and Nancy was placed to the right of Prince Philip. The Thatchers were seated further down the table, with the royal dukes and duchesses.49
At that precise moment on 8 June 1982, news began to trickle in that British forces preparing for a final assault on Port Stanley had suffered a disastrous setback. A daylight attempt to land troops had come under attack from Argentine planes. Two ships, Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram, were bombed. Fifty-one soldiers on board were dead and many more injured. The Argentines believed they had killed 900 British soldiers that day, enough to halt the British advance, a fact that could not be immediately denied in the House of Commons by John Nott, the Defence Secretary, for fear it would disabuse the government in Buenos Aires of the fatal news.50
Six days later, on 14 June, British forces retook Port Stanley and Thatcher immediately drove down to the House of Commons to announce victory. The queen also had a personal reason to be grateful: Prince Andrew, who telephoned her six days later, after the war ended, was alive and unharmed.51
The Falklands had been an enormous gamble, 255 British servicemen killed, 649 Argentines and three Falkland Islanders dead, not to mention the incongruity of spending billions fighting for a group of remote islands Britain didn’t want. Winning the Falklands War was Thatcher’s finest hour. It confirmed her courage and enhanced her stature, transforming her from mere party politician into a national leader. The war boosted Britain’s credibility and prestige at a time when such a boost was badly needed. The nation rediscovered itself, and this created a bond between the people and their leader not seen since the Second World War.52 Mrs Thatcher proved that she could unite the country behind her in times of crisis. Her personal popularity rating soared to 59 per cent.53
Immediately after the victory, Thatcher and the royal family enjoyed their warmest period. At a lunch Cecil Parkinson was hosting after being made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, he spoke to the queen:
The queen very kindly asked me what I was doing for a holiday and I told her; and she asked me what the prime minister was doing, and I made a rather flippant remark that ‘Ma’am the prime minister thinks only lazy people have holidays’. And the queen said, ‘Well that is wrong you know, after the Falklands she has had a very turbulent time, she must have a holiday and a proper holiday.’ And at the end of the day she was about to leave and she called me over and said, ‘They tell me you have influence with the prime minister … if you will tell her she should have a proper holiday so will I.’ And I said ‘Ma’am, it’s, you know, rather easier for you than for me.’ But nevertheless, I did tell her, but it struck me that the queen was genuinely concerned. And so I think she probably did think that Mrs Thatcher on occasions worked too hard … I think it was quite a revealing little incident.54
‘The queen’s view of Margaret Thatcher,’ David Owen states:
I believe changed a great deal after the Falklands. I think the whole of the royal family’s view of her changed. At long last they had a prime minister who made them feel proud to be the royal family and her proud to be queen … Margaret Thatcher gained a huge plus from the Falklands. You know, like a mother she watched that thing very, very closely. The queen had lived through the humiliation of Suez and now it could be argued that shame had been put to rest.55
There was a downside. ‘The Falklands Factor’ validated Margaret Thatcher as mother of the nation.56 The queen no longer seemed solely to occupy that role anymore. There were two queens in the hive. In victory, Thatcher made the mistake of allowing herself, and not the queen, to take the salute at the Mansion House during the force’s victory parade through the City of London. Eyebrows were now raised at Buckingham Palace57 – no member of the royal family had been invited. In the 1945 parade celebrating the victory in the Second World War, Churchill and Attlee were positioned at a discreet distance from the saluting stage.58
‘I mean, Churchill never held a parade,’ said David Owen:
He never held a parade, they [politicians] were invited onto the thing, but the people who took the salute were the king and the queen. Churchill would never have countenanced that a prime minister should do that, and he understood the role, he had after all been in the military.59
Owen feels this is the moment Thatcher’s ego took over:
My diagnosis of Margaret Thatcher is that she has naturally [a] hubristic tendency which most leading politicians have. The queen has got no hubris and is a fine example where she’s not changed at all by it. Thatcher was changed by it, and it gripped her I think in particular for a period after the Falklands War.60
Indeed, as the crowds sang ‘Rule Britannia’, the victorious prime minister seemed transfigured. ‘What a wonderful parade it has been,’ she said, ‘surpassing all our expectations.’ Wearing a broad-brimmed white hat with navy ribbon, navy blue suit and white gloves, Margaret radiated vainglory. Writer Piers Brandon said, ‘This pageant was her apotheosis. It sanctified a heroic egotism and aggravated a raucous intolerance of dissent.’61
‘She wanted to be identified as the victor in the Falklands,’ explained Edwina Currie.62
The queen may have reflected that the Falklands victory was very much Mrs Thatcher’s, but other people felt it was odd not to see the queen, who is head of the armed forces, standing on the dais.63 The sight of her taking the salute with her military leaders drove home a point not lost on either woman. As historian David Cannadine points out:
It was Thatcher’s war. She was responsible for the military direction of the war, so to the extent that the nation rallied, it rallied behind her rather than the queen. The queen was curiously low-key, an absentee.64
Mrs Thatcher allowed herself the pleasure of teasing those who doubted her. She hosted a dinner at Number 10 to thank about eighty of the officers who had carried out the Falklands campaign. She was the only woman present, and after dinner she stood up and said, ‘Gentlemen. Shall we join the ladies?’ The room convulsed with laughter.65
There was also positive news on the fiscal front. Just when 364 top economists sent a letter to The Times rejecting Thatcher’s monetary policies and claiming they would deepen the depression to the point of provoking civil strife, the economy started to recover as inflation retreated and house prices recovered. The prime minister unabashedly claimed an economic miracle.66
Margaret now grew in self-confidence and a sense of her own rightness on every issue. The general election in 1983 was inevitable. Thatcher won an outright landslide with a 144 seat majority. On polling day, 9 June, her daughter Carol asked how, when other leaders had been exhausted by such campaigns, she managed to look ‘younger and prettier’. ‘It’s the job I most want to do in the world,’ was her mother’s reply.67
Thatcher’s election victory was almost a coronation. Until this point, her position in the Conservative Party had been an oddity. She was a woman, she came from outside the traditional ruling class, and she had held no great office of state before becoming prime minister. There had always been the risk that she would be deposed by her party the moment she became an election liability.68 On the day Port Stanley fell, all this changed. This woman with no experience of defence or foreign policy was now a warrior queen. She was Boudicca leading the Iceni against the Romans, and Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury defeating the Spanish Armada. During the early stages of the war, Enoch Powell reminded Thatcher of her ‘Iron Lady’ soubriquet and added, ‘In the next week or two this nation … will learn of what metal she is made’. After victory in the Falklands, Powell said, ‘The substance under test consisted of ferrous matter of the highest quality’.69
This new Gloriana developed her own court of flatterers70 who came and went like Dudley, Essex and Raleigh in Tudor times.71 ‘Queen Margaret’ even adopted the coldly regal expression when ministers displeased her – ‘shall we withdraw our love?’72 Those within her own Cabinet, who still believed consensus politics could work, had the love withdrawn. One by one, Ian Gilmour, Francis Pym, Jim Prior, Mark Carlisle, Norman St John-Stevas and Christopher Soames all found themselves in political exile.
Margaret would come to dominate the Cabinet to the point that her colleagues viewed her as the most overbearing leader they had ever known.73 Lord Carrington argues, ‘If you really want to change things, you have to be slightly blinkered … if you’re not blinkered, people will tell you you can’t do it’.74
Robin Butler, her principal private secretary, felt her management style was because ‘she lacked self-confidence. That was why she was so assertive. She had to pump herself up on adrenaline before any big occasion.’75
Another close colleague of Thatcher’s, Jonathan Aitken, who dated her daughter Carol, felt she needed to master her brief right down to the smallest detail because of this. ‘This over-preparation enabled her to browbeat her ministers.’76
There was also a new queenly, even imperial, style to the prime minister as her triumphs made her appear invincible. Insiders joked that the initials MTFS, which stood for Medium Term Financial Strategy, actual stood for ‘Margaret Thatcher For Sovereign’.77
During the following January, when Thatcher visited the Falkland Islands, the event had the feel and tone of a royal progress. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in the Observer that she was developing a parallel monarchy, becoming ‘a new style elective monarch, as distinct from the recessive ceremonial one’.78 ‘She got grander and grander,’ recalls Whitehall advisor, Sir Clive Whitmore, ‘and I thought this would have gone down badly with the queen.’79
Just as events were going so well for Margaret, her old friend President Reagan became an embarrassment, upsetting the queen, and putting a strain on the Buckingham Palace/Downing Street relationship. By invading the tiny Communist ruled island of Grenada, with a population of just 100,000, the president of the United States completely forgot that Elizabeth II was Queen of Grenada. Although the island had been ruled by Marxists since 1979, Grenada was part of the Commonwealth and retained Elizabeth II as head of state.80 That the British Queen could be the sovereign to a bunch of communists was rather confusing to the Americans.
Reagan had been enjoying a golfing weekend in Georgia when the Cuban-backed Marxist Prime Minister of Grenada, Maurice Bishop, was overthrown and executed by a rival Marxist dictator, General Hudson Austin. The Governor-General of the island, Sir Paul Scoon, who acted as Her Majesty’s representative, asked the US Government to send troops to restore order.81 Legally speaking, Scoon was not obliged constitutionally to seek the queen’s permission before exercising his residual powers. However, it was his duty to inform her of his intention to request intervention and his failure to do so could render the request constitutionally invalid.82
Scoon was not alone in feeling American intervention was needed. The leaders of Jamaica, Barbados, St Vincent’s, St Lucia, Antigua and Dominica wanted US intervention without delay in case their positions were threatened by Grenadian inspired insurrections.83 They were not alarmists. Prime Minister Dame Eugenia Charles of Dominica had survived an abortive coup launched from Grenada the previous year.
Reagan’s sense of urgency was heightened by the fact that on the island were 1,000 American students who could be taken hostage, much like the sixty-six US Embassy staff kidnapped by an Islamic mob in Tehran in November 1979. When Reagan asked how long it would take to mobilise an invasion force to restore order to the island and protect the students and was told forty-eight hours, he simply gave the order: ‘Do it!’84 An invasion was quickly and efficiently mounted and the objective achieved.
Everyone, however, had overlooked the fact that one of Elizabeth’s many titles was Queen of Grenada, and she was furious that she had neither been consulted nor informed by Scoon, or anybody else. It was as if she was irrelevant. Buckingham Palace let it be known (or did not effectively deny) that, as The Times put it, she disapproved of the ‘notion that foreign powers may walk into member states’ of the Commonwealth without warning.85 The queen summoned Margaret Thatcher to explain why Her Majesty had been obliged to hear the news from the BBC and not from the prime minister herself.
Thatcher’s view of the Marxist coup was that the new regime was a ‘change of degree rather than in kind’ and thought Reagan’s concern ‘exaggerated’. This opinion was shared by Reagan’s defence secretary, Casper Weinberger, but he had been overruled by the president. Margaret had made her position clear to him, when he had floated the notion of an invasion to her just hours beforehand. ‘This action will be seen as intervention by a western country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation,’ she warned. ‘I cannot conceal that I am deeply disturbed.’86 The president wrote in his diary, ‘She’s upset and doesn’t think we should do it. I couldn’t tell her it had started.’
Reagan had made a conscious decision, knowing that Thatcher would disapprove, of not telling her in advance. ‘We did not even inform the British beforehand, because I thought it would increase the possibility of a leak at our end and elevate the risk to our students,’ he later explained.87 That wasn’t his only reason. He wanted to purge America of what he called the ‘post-Vietnam syndrome’ which meant that American military action internationally was always haunted by the ghost of the disastrous foreign war. He had also perhaps seen how Thatcher’s victory in the South Atlantic had exorcised the ghost of the Suez Crisis. ‘I understood what Vietnam had meant for the country, but I believed the United States couldn’t remain spooked forever by this experience to the point where it refused to stand up and defend its legitimate national security interests.’88
On the morning of 25 October 1983, 1,900 Army Rangers and Marines stormed their targets. Nineteen Americans were killed and more than 100 injured as they met strong resistance for such a small island. The mission, however, was a success, the leaders of the coup were quickly rounded up, and the American students found safe and well. Thatcher was profoundly unhappy. ‘I felt dismayed and let down by what had happened,’ she recalled, ‘at best, the British Government had been made to look impotent; at worst we looked deceitful.’89 Thatcher pointed out to Reagan the effect his action was liable to have on British opinion at a time when her government was continuing with the deployment of cruise missiles. There were torrents of indignation in the British press about intervention in the affairs of a Commonwealth country.90 Privately, the prime minister was ‘apoplectic, the walls cracked,’ said Edwina Currie, ‘Reagan clearly didn’t understand that British sovereignty was such an issue. To Margaret Thatcher it was everything.’91
Thatcher had to attend the House of Commons to explain how a member of the Commonwealth had been invaded by our closest ally, and then had to defend the invader in the face of widespread condemnation.92 However, Reagan had pulled through for her during the Falklands War, and she would be a steadfast friend. ‘We stand by the United States and will continue to do so in the larger alliances,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘The United States is the final guarantor of freedom in Europe.’93
Thatcher, as David Owen points out, knew post-Falklands that the president ‘sacrificed quite a bit in South America to come on board’.94 Thatcher knew she had to swallow the invasion, but as Lord Carrington pointed out, ‘He ought to have known better, really. He ought to have said “do you mind?”’95
‘Mrs Thatcher was outraged, and she let President Reagan know it, but they talked it through and they decided that the overall importance of the alliance was more important than the friction that this incident caused,’ said Cecil Parkinson.96
The queen, however, was irritated with the prime minister for letting the Americans get away with it. A legend grew up around the incident. There was speculation that one of their regular Tuesday audiences was postponed because of the queen’s displeasure, and when it took place, the queen showed her annoyance to the prime minister by not inviting her to sit down during the meeting. Afterwards, she reported Thatcher’s reaction, ‘Only two curtsies today’.97
‘I think prime ministers have to take day to day decisions, which quite frankly the monarch is above,’ said Cecil Parkinson. He continued:
The monarch can have a view, but it is a constitutional monarchy and the government of the day has to run the country … you don’t want in any way to get at cross purposes with the queen; but the government had to operate in the world where you do get your hands dirty from time to time, but would you want the queen to get hers? She is above all that.98
In fact, the queen’s ignorance was beneficial, otherwise she would have been in the difficult position of either having to betray the secret of an independent country of which she was head of state, or else having to withhold important information from the British Government (which had also been kept in the dark). While the queen’s possessiveness could be interpreted as an instance of her protective interest in Commonwealth countries, in Grenada the US troops were greeted as liberators and democracy was restored.99
On a BBC broadcast on 30 October, Thatcher offered her own principled view of her opposition to what the USA had done:
We use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into independent sovereign countries … If you’re going to pronounce a new law that, wherever communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it’s happened internally, there the USA shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.100
1 Our Queen, Robert Hardman (Hutchinson, 2011).
2 Thatcher’s Britain, Richard Vinen (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
3 The Royals, Kitty Kelly (H.B. Productions Inc., 1997).
4 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
5 Economist, 13–19 April 2013.
6 Time of My Life, Denis Healey (Michael Joseph, 1989).
7 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
8 A Journey with Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy under the Iron Lady, Robin Renwick (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
9 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
10 Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Charles Moore (Penguin, 2013).
11 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
12 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
13 Below the Parapet, Carol Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
14 Falklands – Ridley minute to Carrington, 20 May 1980. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation.)
15 Falklands – Carrington minute to Margaret Thatcher, 20 September 1979. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation.)
16 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
17 ‘How Britain Averted a Falklands Invasion in 1977’, Guardian, 1 June 2005.
18 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
19 Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Charles Moore (Penguin, 2013).
20 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
21 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
22 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
23 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
24 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
25 The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2011).
26 Reagan’s letter to Margaret Thatcher, 5 May 1982. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation.)
27 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
28 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
29 The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2011).
30 Ibid.
31 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
32 There is No Alternative, Claire Berlinski (Basic Books, 2008).
33 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
34 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
35 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
36 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
37 Ibid.
38 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
39 Interview, Ron Allison, 2013.
40 One of Us, Hugo Young (Pan, 2013).
41 Royal Secrets: The View from Downstairs, Stephen P. Barry (Villard Books, 1988).
42 Royal Fortune, Phillip Hall (Bloomsbury, 1992).
43 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
44 Ibid.
45 Nancy Reagan, Kitty Kelly (Bantam, 1992).
46 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
47 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
48 Programme for the Windsor Castle banquet, 8 June 1982. (Margaret Thatcher Foundation.)
49 Ibid.
50 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
51 Queen Elizabeth II, Sarah Bradford (Viking, 2012).
52 Thatcher & Sons, Simon Jenkins (Penguin, 2007).
53 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
54 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
55 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
56 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
57 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
58 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
59 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
60 Ibid.
61 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
62 Interview, Edwina Currie, 2013.
63 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
64 The Windsors, Piers Brendon and Phillip Whitehead (Pimlico, 2000).
65 ‘The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher’, Gail Sheehy, Vanity Fair, June 1989.
66 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
67 Diary of an Election, Carol Thatcher (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983).
68 Thatcher & Sons, Simon Jenkins (Penguin, 2007).
69 Thatcher’s Britain, Richard Vinen (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
70 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
71 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
72 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
73 Women in Power: The Personalities and Leadership Styles of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher, Blema S. Steinberg (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008).
74 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
75 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
76 Ibid.
77 Eminent Elizabethans, Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape, 2012).
78 Observer, 5 June 1983.
79 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
80 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
81 Elizabeth, the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith (Penguin Books, 2012).
82 Grenada: Revolution and Invasion, A. Payne, P. Sutton and T. Thorndike (Crown Helm, 1984).
83 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
84 Ibid.
85 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
86 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
87 An American Life, Ronald Reagan (Simon & Schuster, 1990).
88 Ibid.
89 The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2011).
90 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
91 Interview Edwina Currie, 2013.
92 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).
93 The Royals, Kitty Kelly (H.B. Productions Inc., 1997).
94 Interview, David Owen, 2013.
95 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
96 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
97 Observer, 30 October 1983.
98 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
99 A Journey with Margaret Thatcher: Foreign Policy under the Iron Lady, Robin Renwick (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
100 Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage, Nicholas Wapshott (Penguin, 2007).