Chris Collins conversation with Lord Powell at his office in London
12 September 2007
MT’s broad outlook to foreign policy
CC:
Lord Powell, you began working for Margaret Thatcher at the end of 1983, but may I start with a question as to what you think she may have brought to the job when she became Prime Minister, in regard to foreign policy? What was her outlook, do you think?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher didn’t bring much experience in foreign policy when she became Prime Minister: her political experience had been exclusively in the domestic field. She had various jobs in earlier governments, in areas as arcane as pensions and as politically sensitive as education, but foreign policy was not an area she was particularly familiar with. She had certain strong instincts, and one of them was the importance of a very close attachment to the United States of America. The second was a very strong sense of anti-communism, that communism was evil and had to be confronted. Also, one has to say, a strong support for British membership of the European Community. She had led the Conservative ’Yes’ Campaign in the referendum in the early 1970s and therefore came with a basis of belief that Britain had a role in Europe and had to play that role. So those I think I would identify as the three main drivers in her broad foreign policy outlook. But it hadn’t really been based on practical experience, it was all her basic instincts.
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The European Community
Impact on MT of the European budget argument, 1979-84
CC:
Yes, to pick up on your remarks on the European Union, at the moment you began working for her the great budget argument that had dominated our relations with Europe since 1979 was coming to a close, and the final settlement – or at least the final settlement for a while – came at Fontainebleau in June 1984. Do you feel that that argument overshadowed what came later, or was she successful in putting it behind her? She seemed in some ways to want to, didn’t she? She wanted to move on?
Charles Powell:
I think the dispute over Britain’s budget contribution tainted – and even I would say warped – Margaret Thatcher’s view of the European Community for the rest of her time as Prime Minister. That it had taken her five years hard struggle to get what she regarded as elementary justice for Britain and its financial contribution made her believe that the European Community was a pretty self-interested, self-centred organization in which it would always be hard for Britain to feel properly at home. You see, she had really had to fight to get fairness for us on this. She had had to raise it at every single meeting of the European Council. She had had to cope with being patronised and confronted by many of her other European colleagues – President Giscard, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt – and it really bruised her feelings, as I’m sure she bruised the feelings of other European leaders by her persistence in pursuing it. But, as I say, it did qualify her view of Europe, from the basically positive, favourable view which had led her to lead the Conservative campaign in favour of Britain’s membership in 1975, to the more sceptical view which she firmly held by the time she ceased to be Prime Minister in 1990.
Now, once the budget issue was resolved, she was certainly determined to try to move on to more positive matters. And she identified very quickly the Single Market as being a positive issue on which she could play – Britain could play – a major role in Europe. She looked at it like this. In the Treaty of Rome, 1957, there was a commitment to establish a Single Market in Europe, a market without boundaries and obstacles to it. Almost nothing had been done by 1985 to achieve that aim, almost nothing, and she determined that this was the moment to do it, because it was be good for Europe, it would good for economic growth, and it would be good for Britain, because we were a more open market, more a trading country than the others. So this she saw as the positive opportunity.
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The Single Market
CC:
The Single Market initiative begins to wind its way through at the Milan European Council in 1985. And it is also at that moment that a new Commission is appointed with Jacques Delors as President and Lord Cockfield – Arthur Cockfield – as one of the British Commissioners, the Conservative choice as it were. Could you say something about the relationship which Margaret Thatcher had with Delors Commission, which seems to have begun on reasonably good terms, but then deteriorated markedly?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher had high hopes for the Delors Commission when it first came into office. Indeed, she had been supportive of it and had sent Arthur Cockfield to Brussels as a mark of her serious intent, if you like. She had a high regard for Arthur Cockfield as an accountant, a tax expert, somebody with a very precise mind. And she thought he was just the right sort of person to bring progress to the Single Market and to the technical issues surrounding it. And indeed she was right. He had a highly organized mind and he made an enormous contribution in Brussels to creating the Single Market. I remember she said once of Arthur Cockfield – slightly wickedly but with the best of intentions – “You know, Arthur can never pass a row of pigeonholes without wishing to fill every one of them”. But it describes the very organized mind that he had.
Unfortunately, her relationship with Delors deteriorated over the years, and it reached its low point really when he became the enthusiastic promoter of the single currency, which she absolutely believed was not right for Europe, and certainly not right for Britain. And she believed that he had the aspiration to extend the powers of Europe, and above all the powers of the Commission, into too many aspects of national life. And when he came to Britain in 1988 and said in a speech to the Trade Union Congress that within a few years 80 per cent of the powers which were now national would belong to Europe, that was a step too far for Margaret Thatcher. And it was frankly that which led her to the Bruges speech, which was in a way a riposte to Delors’s view of the role of the Commission and the role of Europe in national life. Thus far and no further was her view.
CC:
The Single Market led on to … well, the Single Market was put into effect by the Single European Act, which was agreed at Luxembourg – very quickly after Milan, only five and a half months later – in December 1985. And of course it has been attacked in hindsight by almost everybody. The Eurosceptics have said why on earth did Margaret Thatcher sign up to something like this? Many people who were more pro-European have said, well, again, if later on she emerged as a great opponent of further extension of Community powers, yet here she is voting it through. What was her thinking at the time in regard to QMV [qualified majority voting] and the main provisions of the Act?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher knew exactly what she was doing when she signed up to the Single European Act. She was determined to see the Single Market in Europe implemented, and the only way that could work would be by extending Qualified Majority Voting. That was a crucial part of it. It would never work otherwise, and on the balance of advantage she was absolutely clear that Britain would gain from this.
Now, there was a price to be paid – it wasn’t actually a very big price – but other areas were brought within the ambit of the Treaty and one or two, very minor, additional powers were given to the European Parliament. She regarded these as a price worth paying for the greater good of securing the Single Market. And don’t forget, a lot of other countries in Europe were very sceptical, not to say resistant, to the Single Market.
In one or two areas, she determined that Britain must make exception and remain outside the arrangements envisaged, and one of the most important was the so-called Schengen Agreement for removing borders. She was absolutely certain we couldn’t agree to open our borders indiscriminately to anyone who happened to be able to get into the wider borders of the European Community. But basically she went along with everything that was there in the belief that it was a good deal for Britain.
CC:
The Commission, of course, later used the powers, in her view and in many people’s view, to extend its scope. Is that something that came us a surprise to you all, or could you, with hindsight, have anticipated that they might?
Charles Powell:
I think with hindsight we should have been more alert to the Commission’s duplicity in some of these matters – using powers for purposes for which they were never intended, and indeed purposes which had never been discussed – in order to get their way and circumvent the obstacles, as they saw it, to the further extension of Europe’s role and their own powers. We erred there.
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The Bruges speech, September 1988
CC:
That leads me on to Bruges, which we touched on before. We’ve seen some of the origins of it. What do you think was the impact of that speech? Were you surprised at the massive impact it eventually had, because, of course, it echoes down the years?
Charles Powell:
No, I’m not surprised that Bruges had a major impact. It was intended to have a major impact. Of course, Margaret Thatcher knew that it wouldn’t be welcomed by all the high priests of European Union Federalism and so on, but she really took the view that Europe had gone far enough – indeed, too far – in the direction of extending its powers in international life and she wanted to set out an alternative vision of Europe.
It wasn’t entirely a negative speech. It was always presented by her enemies and her opponents as a great attack on Europe. It was an alternative vision of Europe, a vision she believed was better suited to preserving a balance between nation states, and what they should do, and the European Community and the Commission in Brussels. And it emphasised such things as the importance of enlargement. It reminded other European countries that over there beyond the Iron Curtain were other countries that were entitled to expect a future, eventually, in Europe. And of course that has now come to pass, and it was given a high priority, belatedly, from the second half of the 1990s. She was right. It laid a stress on the importance of developing European-American relations. Again, she was right about that. We need a strong transatlantic relationship. And she tried to set in perspective the powers of Europe as against the wider interests of its member states, and I think she was very successful in doing so. Whether people like to admit it or not, much of Bruges has actually come to pass, and a good thing too.
CC:
So in fact she wouldn’t have thought of it as an anti-European speech? It was a speech critical of tendencies in the Commission and thinking among some of the senior politicians of the day, but not anti-Europe as such?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher saw Bruges as an alternative vision of Europe to that being pursued by many other people, particularly European federalists. Of course, she was critical of what the Commission were doing in some areas, what some other member states were doing, a single currency being one particular … there were others too. She just thought they were going too far and she was determined to draw a line in the sand and go no further.
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Balance sheet of Margaret Thatcher’s European policy
CC:
Could we quickly essay a balance sheet for her European policy, looking back from the present?
Charles Powell:
I would say that the balance sheet of Margaret Thatcher’s policies towards Europe was actually pretty positive, at least from Britain’s point of view. She got back our money, as she said she would, and indeed over the years that has produced a huge financial benefit to Britain, which we continue to enjoy today. Of course, it is only fair, but it is a benefit we would not otherwise have had if she had just left herself in the hands of the Eurocrats. Secondly, she I think can take great credit for the Single Market, and the priority that was given in Europe. And it is, after all, one of the real practical benefits of European membership. There are many other benefits which are rather airy and philosophical, or rhetorical, but don’t really bite on individuals’ lives, don’t benefit them practically. The Single Market does that, it does bring benefits. I would say also that though it came subsequent to her time, the focus on enlargement, above all to Eastern Europe, is something for which she can claim an element of credit. So despite in her later years, particularly, the rhetoric about Europe – which perhaps sometimes became a bit excessive – basically, for me, the balance is a positive one, positive for Britain and actually more positive for Europe than most people would admit.
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Eastern Europe & the Soviets
A British ostpolitik?
CC:
Lord Powell, on Eastern Europe, one of the panels at the conference is titled “Thatcher’s Ostpolitik”, in slightly provocative style. I don’t think we need to spend much time on her debt to Willy Brandt and his successors, but the idea that she pursued a distinctive policy towards Eastern and Central Europe is surely a reasonable one, and I wanted to start trying to put that into perspective by glancing, a little before your time, at the Polish crises of 1980-81. At that point, it is interesting that Margaret Thatcher seems more almost in tune with the Carter Administration’s approach than the Reagan Administration’s, particularly over the pipeline sanctions that emerge from the declaration of martial law in December 1981. It is, in a later period, obviously not the case that she is at odds with the Reagan Administration, and it seems almost a condition of a policy towards Eastern Europe, a viable policy, that she shouldn’t be. What’s your view of those events and what allowed us to get beyond them, do you think?
Charles Powell:
I would take a broad view of Margaret Thatcher’s approach to both the Soviet Union and East Europe. The fundamental point of it was to work very closely indeed with President Reagan, with the United States, in bringing maximum pressure to bear on Soviet communism, in the belief that communism was evil and must be brought down. That really informed her whole attitude to these matters throughout her time as Prime Minister, and indeed before.
Within that, she saw Eastern Europe as the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union, if you like. We all knew that people in Eastern Europe hated the communist system and were only kept … kept under it by force. And, therefore, if one could begin to work one’s way into Eastern Europe, then it would begin to loosen the structure of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union and thereby weaken and undermine communism. So there was a definite broad strategy to achieve this. And the implementation of it you could see in her first visit to Hungary as Prime Minister in 1984, and then again further visits to Eastern Europe in the later 1980s. And there … it was a rational, a logical policy.
The Polish crisis in 80-81 obviously presented her with some difficult choices. Really where she differed from the Reagan Administration was on the question of extraterritoriality. That was the United States trying to impose its laws on other people. I would wish the government today was as firm in resisting this as she was then. She believed that you couldn’t outlaw contracts, you couldn’t renege on contracts, people must be allowed to finish contracts on which … for which they have signed and on which they had started, and she was very vociferous in making clear to the Reagan Administration that this was to be the case. But on the fundamental strategy towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, there was no difference between them.
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Overall British approach to Eastern Europe
CC:
Granted that she had a distinctive Central and Eastern European policy, could you describe the principal methods by which it was pursued? I’m particularly struck by the fact that it seems to begin to take shape in 1983/84, when Gorbachev is still a glimmer on the horizon – perhaps slightly more tangible than that, but not in a leadership position.
Charles Powell:
There are really two strands to Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by the time you get to 1983, 1984. One is to target the Eastern European countries individually, to build contacts with them, to try to discreetly convey to them that there was light at the end of the tunnel, if you like, that one day there was the prospect of freedom for them. And she did that by encouraging her ministers, at various different levels, to go and make contacts, particularly with Hungary which was seen as the most approachable of Eastern European countries at that stage, and particularly Mr Kadar , who was the party secretary. I remember him being invited back to Downing Street. And so these personal links are being forged.
Then there was a separate strand, which really dates from December 1984, when President Gorbachev – or just Mr Gorbachev as he was then – came on his first visit to the United Kingdom. And you know that was almost by chance. She determined that we must get to know the next generation of Soviet leaders. And a number of names were put forward as potential future leaders. One was a man called Grishin, who was the Moscow Party Secretary. Another was a man called Romanov, who was the Leningrad Party Secretary at the time. So we sprayed letters of invitation to all these people, including Gorbachev, and to our great good fortune, it was Gorbachev – of whom we knew very little – who first replied and accepted. And this opened a new era in her whole relationship with the Soviet Union.
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Gorbachev’s visit to Chequers, December 1984
CC:
I was going to ask you next about that Chequers meeting, because you were there and I imagine you wrote the note for it. What do you recall of that meeting? Could put us in the room a bit? What was it like?
Charles Powell:
The Chequers meeting when Gorbachev and Mrs Gorbachev came to Chequers I think was almost a turning point in East-West relations. You see we had been used to generations of dour Soviet leaders – geriatric in many cases – who read out formal statements and were quite incapable of discussion and debate. Suddenly we were confronted with somebody who seemed to act and even think like a western politician, someone who could debate and could argue, who didn’t need bits of paper and advisers and so on. And from the very moment Gorbachev came into the Great Hall of Chequers, beaming, bouncing on the balls of his feet, you could see this was an entirely different person to all previous Soviet leaders. And as lunch developed, and he and Mrs. Thatcher sat next to each other, they argued right the way through lunch – I don’t believe either of them touched anything – but argued in a good-humoured way of give and take. And afterwards we retired to another room in the building, just Mr Gorbachev and Mrs. Thatcher and an adviser on each side, and the discussion continued. Indeed it overran by an hour or two. And Gorbachev had no need to consult anyone. He didn’t produce great documents or anything. He had I remember a little notebook, in which he had made a few notes in green ink which he occasionally glanced down at for a statistic or two. But it was a most enlightening experience. And it was at the end of that meeting when we were looking to convey the gist of the whole experience to the British press and beyond that Mrs. Thatcher came up with the phrase “a man I can do business with”.
And I think that really marked the moment when we moved from the sort of all-out hostility to the Soviet Union, to communism, to “right, now here’s an opportunity to deal with somebody new”. You have to remember he wasn’t already President, he wasn’t General Secretary, he was just a newly elected member of the Politburo, in charge of agriculture, but it was impossible to doubt at that moment that here was a man who was going to lead the Soviet Union.
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MT’s relationship with Gorbachev
CC:
Do you think … their relations obviously were very good from that first meeting, and it stayed with them, didn’t it, the sense of how well it had gone. But do you think she ever really totally lowered her guard with him and he was her? Were they on first name terms, for example? I believe they weren’t?
Charles Powell:
The relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Mr Gorbachev was a complex one. It was friendly from the beginning in the sense there was no personal hostility, no unpleasantness or anything of that sort. Of course, they both came from very different systems and both were strong, profound believers in the values of those systems – though Mr Gorbachev began to shift ground pretty rapidly on communism.
But it was not an informal relationship in the sense that none of Mrs. Thatcher’s relationships were informal. She would call President Reagan “Mr President” and she would certainly always use a proper, respectful formal of address with Mr Gorbachev. That’s no surprise. She did that with every foreign leader. It was just her style, and many of us would think it was the correct style. But the relationship grew and developed and they had more and more events together and informal meals - there was one in No.10 and then a year later there was one in Moscow round a fire in a sugar baron’s great mansion which was just the two Gorbachevs, the two Thatchers, the then Soviet Prime Minister and his wife, and I was there. And it was a very very friendly occasion and the conversation ranged over all sorts of issues in a very open-minded way.
I always have one particular memory of that occasion when Mr Gorbachev was saying proudly something about his working class origins and Mrs Gorbachev said very firmly: “But we are not working class, we are middle class”. And Gorbachev really looked quite crestfallen.
But the personal relationship has continued to this day. Mr Gorbachev very kindly calls on Lady Thatcher every time he comes to Britain and they have a talk. And it is one of those personal relationships which can have a real influence in world affairs. Sometimes people put much too much weight on personal relationships and think that if they have a nice chat with someone then that solves the problems. It wasn’t like that with Thatcher and Gorbachev, but the relationship … the ability to talk frankly to each other without hang-ups and without bitterness and recrimination I think was one of the key factors in breaking down the Cold War and all the barriers.
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British towards Poland after 1985 & MT’s visit there in November 1988
CC:
We can’t go through country by country looking at policy towards Eastern Europe, but perhaps I could focus on Poland because in so many ways it seems to have been the key to the events that unrolled in the late 80s. Your policy towards Poland, the government’s policy, was gradually to open up links to the regime of General Jaruzelski. One sees Geoffrey Howe, for example, going to Poland as Foreign Secretary in 1985 and there were various other visits. And that culminates in Lady Thatcher’s visit in November 1988, which I’m sure is one that sticks in your mind.
Could you give an account of how Polish policy unfolded and in particular what you remember of that visit?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards Poland was really part of her wider policy towards Eastern Europe, of building contacts, hoping to loosen them from the grip of the Soviet Union, and encouraging people to believe that one day they could be free. And a succession of ministers were sent to Poland – Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind I remember going – and really it culminated in her own visit in late 1988. And really in a sense Poland took over from Hungary as the main target, if you like, in Eastern Europe, because the conditions seemed more favourable.
Her visit in November 1988 was really another seminal visit. She had insisted as the price of going she must be allowed to meet Lech Walesa, who at the time was under house arrest, or certainly excluded from active political life. And she was granted that right and took advantage of it. And very properly she went to Warsaw first and met General Jaruzelski and the members of the government, and then went up to Gdansk.
And the Polish Government rather cleverly at a certain moment in her programme took us to a hotel, just her and me, put us in a room and then withdrew every aspect of government or state involvement, even down to the security guards. They all disappeared and we were just left in this hotel room. After we had been there for some ten minutes or so looking at each other, there was a little knock on the door and it opened a little way and the unmistakable features of Lech Walesa appeared round it, then promptly disappeared again and then came back into the room with a young man who was acting as his interpreter and later became his Defence Minister, Janusz Onyszkiewicz. And he and Mrs. Thatcher settled down and had a great talk and then we walked across the road to the house of his parish priest, where she had lunch with Walesa and all his principal advisers, all the leading members of the Solidarity movement, a very remarkable occasion. And after lunch we went into the adjoining church, which was packed. And there they started to sing, and it really was I think one of the moving moments of her whole prime ministership, to hear this singing in that atmosphere of hope and belief in freedom. I think it was one of the very few times in her prime ministership that I remember Margaret Thatcher being reduced to tears.
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The “Iron Lady” tag
CC:
And she drew with great success on the reputation that had been with her, courtesy really of the Soviets, since the mid-70s, of being the Iron Lady. These visits and the kind of impact she made wouldn’t have been nearly as effective had it not been for that …
Charles Powell:
There is no doubt that Margaret Thatcher benefited from her reputation as an Iron Lady. It made her a sort of beacon of hope for people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and she was very conscious how that could affect opinion. And for instance when she paid her very successful – again, rather seminal – visit to the Soviet Union in 1987, she had taken up Mr Gorbachev’s promise that she could go wherever she wanted and do whatever she wished, which was at the time a very unusual thing. Foreign visitors went to Moscow and they stayed in Moscow, within the walls of the Kremlin most of the time. And she started her visit with an extraordinary walkabout at the great monastery of Zagorsk, outside Moscow, with huge crowds of thousands of people cheering her. And the same happened in Moscow the next day. Wherever she went there were vast crowds and her motorcade had to come to a halt. And again when she then later in the same visit went to Georgia, to Tblisi, the same thing happened. It had never been seen in the Soviet Union before. This really was the first occasion when a leading Western figure had been allowed to mix with the Soviet public. And it had an extraordinary effect.
Of course being a woman helped. When Margaret Thatcher’s … one of her great advantages in foreign affairs is that she was instantly recognisable. Many British Prime Ministers could walk down the street in Eastern Europe and no one would have a clue who they were, let alone Italian or even French ministers and so on. But a woman Prime Minister with a reputation as an Iron Lady, you couldn’t lose.
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German reunification
CC:
Could we go on to consider the events of 1989 and to some degree of 1990 as well, the sudden remarkable unravelling of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe. Obviously, I think it is true, that no one predicts this happening: one needn’t labour that. The question is how people react. And a lot of criticism has descended on Margaret Thatcher in relation to this because of her position on German unification. Can you explain what her policy was? Was she hoping to stop German unification or slow it down? What was her thinking?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to German reunification was quite widely misunderstood I think, although as she herself admits her policy on Germany was one of the least successful aspects of her overall foreign policy.
You see Margaret Thatcher had invested very heavily in her relationship with Mr Gorbachev and in encouraging reforms in the Soviet Union, encouraging perestroika and the whole new approach which Gorbachev was taking. She was very fearful that a rush to German reunification would destabilise and undermine Mr Gorbachev, put him at risk from hardliners in the Soviet Union, and of course she was right – it just took a year longer than she had feared. And therefore when German reunification appeared as a live issue she was keen to see it managed in a way which would cause the least possible damage to Gorbachev’s position.
And this wasn’t just something devised in her own mind. Mr Gorbachev himself had made this point very strongly. And no one had made it to her more strongly than President Mitterrand, who had come over to Britain and said to her “we’ve got to stop this, this is dreadful the way that German reunification is rushing ahead”. Now, of course, President Mitterrand promptly changed tack in the space of about a week and became an ardent supporter of it.
Margaret Thatcher knew that she had to support German reunification. All British Governments, all British Prime Ministers had supported it. And it was not just a matter of words: we did support it. But she wanted it to go more slowly. She wanted a period of confederation between West Germany and East Germany, leading on to a federal structure, leading on to reunification, because she believed that would cause less disruption in the rest of Europe. It would not put at risk the democratic progress in Eastern European countries, it wouldn’t involve a risk of a Soviet crackdown on those countries again.
So it was not an irrational policy. It was not built on some deep dislike of Germany. No. It was built most of all on the fear that what had been achieved up until then in defusing tensions with the Soviet Union could all be put in jeopardy if Germany reunified in a flash and Gorbachev was ousted from the Soviet Union.
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Balance sheet of Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards Eastern Europe
CC:
Could we close with a balance sheet, again, of policy towards Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union?
Charles Powell:
Margaret Thatcher’s policy towards East and Central Europe and the Soviet Union was a huge success. Of course it wasn’t all down to her; the Americans had by far the greatest role in relation to the Soviet Union. But she worked extremely closely with President Reagan, shared his outlook on almost everything, and indeed had briefed him from her very first meeting with Mr Gorbachev, that here was a different sort of man, here was a man he, President Reagan, must get to grips with and start to negotiate with.
And therefore the negotiations the United States and the Soviet Union on arms control, which had been broken off, were restarted, and you see all the subsequent steps which were taken towards reducing nuclear weapons. So I can’t believe anyone can see this other than a great success for American, British and to some degree other European diplomacy, in which she played an extraordinarily prominent part, because of the very hard line she had taken against communism and the Soviet Union at the beginning, and because of the relationship she had forged with Mr Gorbachev, and because of her approach to Eastern Europe, as I said earlier, to try to loosen the ties of those countries with the Soviet Union, and therefore put the whole system of communism in Eastern Europe at risk.
CC:
Lord Powell, thank you very much.
Charles Powell:
Thank you.