John Major: The Autobiography

The move to the Foreign Office changed my life in ways that were not all welcome. I was now considered to be a target for terrorists, and for security reasons I had to move out of my flat in Durand Gardens – let to me by Stan Hurn, an old friend from banking days. But the real disruption was to my lifestyle at Finings, a sanctuary in good and bad days, that changed beyond recognition.

Overnight, security moved in. A caravan disfigured my garden to house a detachment of the Cambridgeshire constabulary, and my garage was surrendered to the same cause. Electronic devices invaded the house and garden like unwanted Daleks. Changes were made to the house and to the perimeter of the garden. An armoured car and protection officers accompanied me every day, and that most precious of gifts – freedom of movement – was gone.

No longer could I walk down the road alone or call in at a shop. I was always accompanied. In time I became accustomed to this, and the protection officers became part of an extended family. At the time, however, Norma and I were desolate at our loss of privacy. The first few weeks of adjustment were miserable.

The Foreign Office were shellshocked at losing Geoffrey after more than five years. And they didn’t expect me as his replacement. Did I really know or care about foreign affairs? Was I to be Mrs Thatcher’s hatchet-man at the Foreign Office? They had reason to fear so, since all they knew of me was that as chief secretary I had questioned the expenditure of their department, as of all others. It was not the best of introductions, but the officials were too professional to let it show.

Their fears about me soon went away when they realised I did not have a mandate to reverse our European policies, and when I negotiated a satisfactory public expenditure settlement. This was not difficult. I saw Norman Lamont, who had taken my place as chief secretary, alone. Norman knew that I had approved the Treasury’s bottom line as chief secretary, and would remember it. Moreover, being familiar with the layout of Treasury expenditure briefs, I could read Norman’s notes upside down as they lay in front of him. We soon reached an agreement. A very good one, too.

My new office was outrageously grand (the staff apologised that the foreign secretary’s room was being redecorated, and would this do?). It was entirely suitable for impressing visitors, and equally unsuitable for serious work. I prefer a plain room to work in, with a large table on which to spread everything out comfortably, and with few distractions. My new office did not meet these specifications, so, except when receiving guests, I decamped to the anteroom next to the Private Office.

I also took an instant dislike to Carlton Gardens, the foreign secretary’s gilded but somewhat faded London home. Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe were in no hurry to move out, and I was in no hurry to move in. I told them to take their time, and settled into a flat at the Foreign Office so I could work longer hours and keep a closer eye on everything that happened. This was thought rather eccentric.

Geoffrey was stunned, almost disbelieving, at what had happened. ‘Incredible, bizarre, astounding,’ was apparently his reaction. The party was equally astonished. When he first appeared in the Commons in his new role as Leader of the House he received a tumultuous reception. It went on and on, and was clearly for Geoffrey and against Margaret. It was a warning that should have been noticed.

Geoffrey, whatever his private feelings, went out of his way to help me settle in at the Foreign Office. We met for what was intended to be a briefing but turned out simply to be a friendly chat. It was an odd encounter: the man who had loved the job wishing good luck to the man who did not want it. But he was supportive in public and in private – the perfect predecessor. If he felt any rancour, it was not directed at me.

I found the Foreign Office a revelation. Patrick Wright, the genial Permanent Secretary, went out of his way to be helpful. The officials were very high-calibre, and so was my ministerial team, all of whom, except William Waldegrave, were new to the Foreign Office. And yet whole forests were felled to produce long, comprehensive, written briefings. The professionalism was impressive, but it seemed to me that even trivial matters were sent to the foreign secretary for his decision, or simply to keep him informed. The Foreign Office was far more hierarchical than the Treasury.

Within days of my arrival I decided to devolve decision-making. In this I had the energetic support of Stephen Wall, who was a tower of strength, and Patrick Wright. My ministers William Waldegrave, Francis Maude, Tim Sainsbury, Ivon Brabazon and my old friend Lynda Chalker were perfectly capable of taking decisions on all sorts of matters without reference upwards. William Waldegrave had a brilliant academic mind, and was often talked of as a future prime minister. He had a phenomenal breadth of knowledge, but his intellect was not invariably an asset: it did not always equip him to understand the hopes and fears of lesser minds. Francis Maude was another with a first-class brain. He doesn’t just look at things, he looks behind them. With Francis, there was no doubt that he had the ambition to sustain his ability. Lynda Chalker, whom I’d known since she was seventeen, was to become something of a legendary figure in sub-Saharan Africa, where they adored her, and called her the Great White Mother. I remember her shaking her finger at Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, who was towering above her, holding a fly whisk.

I wanted to clear the decks for the big issues – especially Europe – that I knew I would soon have to face. I soon realised that the Foreign Office was very bruised and hurt by the open contempt in which it believed the Prime Minister held it – too many of her private bons mots had been reported back. I thought it ironic that the Prime Minister who so admired many individuals in the department should be so suspicious of it as an institution.

But I also soon saw why Mrs Thatcher felt as she did. Papers would be prepared in support of a recommendation, setting out facts which it was thought the Prime Minister would like, but omitting others which it was thought she would not. Charles Powell would of course swiftly rumble this tactic and assume that the Foreign Office was trying to hoodwink him and his boss. I stepped in at once, and personally altered any papers I considered at fault in this respect. From then on there was far less trouble between the Foreign Office and Number 10.

Treasury briefs, which concern the hard facts of finance, came easily to me, since I have always had a facility for absorbing figures. Briefs at the Foreign Office were different. They were about themes, and were less precise than economic papers. I did not immediately find them as easy to absorb as those I had been used to. It was said subsequently that during my time at the Foreign Office I did not like handling several issues at once. This was absurd. I had done that at the Treasury as a matter of course, and would do so later as prime minister. What I did not like was being asked to approve documents twenty times a day without having the time to digest them and consider their impact on policy. I did not like receiving bits of paper with a few scraps of generalised information and a request for a decision. I would say repeatedly, ‘I don’t know the background to this. I’d like to know it before I agree anything.’ I would then speak to the officials, however junior, who could brief me in full. I have never been happy with superficial explanations. I have never been prepared just to wave things through.

I soon began to acclimatise myself. I discovered, rather unexpectedly, that the skills I needed as foreign secretary were very similar to those I had honed at the Treasury: an ability to prevail in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations without humiliating one’s opponent; and to make a dispassionate judgement of what could be achieved in the long term.

As I settled into the job I became more enthusiastic about it. I was frustrated that routine meetings with ambassadors and high commissioners took up so much time, although I was frequently told that Geoffrey had loved them. Nor did I view all the invitations to banquets and similar functions with any real eagerness – the only thing I enjoyed less than banquets were G7 summits.

Policy, though, was a different matter. There was a large field to play on, and the prospect was one I relished. And foreign-policy decisions cast a long shadow. Within a day of arriving at the Foreign Office I had to advise the Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet (OD) whether or not to permit the export of British Aerospace’s Hawk aircraft to Iraq. It was an attractive and lucrative sale which would be worth £1 billion initially and up to £3 billion over time, with up to 230 sub-contractors benefiting.

The MoD were in favour of the sale, and although they fairly set out the objections to it, they believed it could be justified within the guidelines for arms sales. I did not. The trainer version of Hawk could easily be adapted to carry all kinds of weapons, including chemical weapons, and would have been a wicked instrument if used – as I feared it would have been – for internal repression of Iraq’s Kurds. Nor was I alone in that fear. MPs including Labour’s Ann Clwyd and Jeremy Corbyn had already focused attention on human rights in Iraq, and had been well justified in doing so. I was clear that we should not sell Hawk trainers to Iraq, and warned Number 10 of the line I would take at OD.

Mrs Thatcher opened the discussion, as was her wont. She supported the argument she knew I was going to put, and no one in Cabinet said a word against her. There was no need. My recommendation was clear, and the Prime Minister’s support was absolute. Everyone agreed that the sale should not go ahead. The Cabinet were not in favour of tyrants, or of selling weapons of repression to them. It was ironic that later we were to be accused of exporting arms to Iraq, since when Cabinet had the opportunity to do so it had refused.

Other issues were pressing for solution worldwide. The Soviet empire was collapsing. We had to consider aid for the new non-Communist government in Poland. We needed to re-establish relations with Argentina after the Falklands War. The Commonwealth Conference lay ahead, with inevitable ructions about South Africa. The European Community was gearing up for more integration. The Vietnamese boat people – 150,000 of them crowded into camps in Hong Kong, and still arriving – were a human as well as an international problem. Meanwhile three British citizens – Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Jackie Mann – had already been held hostage in Lebanon for over two thousand days.

For myself, the most immediate concern was a twenty-nation peace conference convened to discuss Cambodia and due to open in Paris on 30 July, less than a week after I had taken up office. Its primary objective was to prevent the Khmer Rouge, responsible under their murderous leader Pol Pot for the slaughter of untold numbers of Cambodians, from wielding any further power. The British were peripheral players in this drama, and had limited expectations of the outcome. But the conference, which of course marked my debut on the international scene, was an excellent introduction to the diplomatic circuit. Diplomacy is the oil that smoothes the movement of states from incompatible positions towards compromise. It has its own language, its own nuance. Stamina and patience are essential. Realism and oratory are both in demand, though frequently also in conflict. It has a fascination all its own if you can develop a high threshold of tolerance for frustration and – sometimes – hypocrisy in a worthy cause.

An essential component of any gathering of foreign ministers is bilateral discussion – that is, a meeting confined to two principals accompanied only by their top aides. At Paris, with my ‘L’ plates still fresh, I had two of significance.

The first was with Jim Baker, the US Secretary of State and a close ally of President Bush. I had not met him before, and I wished to resolve a dispute that was poisoning the atmosphere between our two countries over the Vietnamese boat people. More than thirty-one thousand had arrived in Hong Kong within the year, and around three hundred a day were sailing into the colony. Genuine refugees were being found homes around the world, but economic migrants, who were not refugees, were the nub of the 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 to our relationship with Germany.

Then came the conference season, always in autumn. The first to concern me was the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in September, then the Conservative Party Conference at Blackpool in October, and finally the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM – ‘Chog-um’ to everyone at the Foreign Office), held that year in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur.

The UNGA is a massive foreign-policy jamboree where representatives from all over the world come together to express their views. Paradoxically, with few exceptions, their speeches are ignored by the world media, but for diplomats they set out in order of urgency each country’s hopes and fears. My speech contained a good deal of standard foreign-policy fare – although I had to fight hard for tough passages on the internal situation in China – and also some personal matters that I felt were important. One concerned the drugs trade.

Years earlier, during my Latin American tour as a member of the Whips’ Office, I had visited Colombia. Near the British Embassy in Bogotá I met some men in fatigues displaying weapons and devices for use against drugs traffickers. They turned out to be members of the British Army sent to help the Colombians in their fight against this lethal trade. I now offered to increase that help.

I also pleased the Africans with a lengthy passage on South Africa. ‘Apartheid cannot survive and does not deserve to survive,’ I said. ‘It is not something to be tolerated or to be patient with. It is something to oppose constantly and comprehensively.’ I not only believed this, I also thought it might sweeten the atmosphere at CHOGM the following month. I was wrong – it did not. But a scholarship scheme I announced for black South Africans was well received.

One of my earliest actions as foreign secretary had been to agree to open talks – led, on our side, by Sir Crispin Tickell, our Permanent Representative at the United Nations – with the Argentinians in Madrid. These had made some progress in re-establishing our still shaky relationship following the Falklands War, and I sought to carry it forward by meeting the Argentinian Foreign Minister during my time in New York. I also met Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, in an attempt to secure the release of a British citizen who had been jailed in Baghdad. Aziz attempted to link the case with that of an Iraqi in London who had been convicted of murder. I told him that British politicians could not – and would not – interfere with our legal system. He seemed pretty baffled by this. Years later Robin Cook, as Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary, mistakenly claimed that my meeting with Aziz had been ‘secret’. This had the effect of suggesting that we had been discussing illegal arms sales. It took the officials on whom I was obliged to call most of a Saturday searching through files to provide the information to refute this mischief.

Other bilaterals left their own memories. While a further meeting with Qian Qichen had been unproductive but friendly, one with the Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens was less friendly. I asked some questions about Israeli policy which offended him. ‘I’m not in a court of law – I don’t have to answer your questions,’ he said. I wasn’t seeking a row with him, and in fact spent much of my time later at Number 10 improving Anglo – Israeli relationships. But this was a tricky start. The Hungarian Foreign Minister was amusing, with anecdote upon anecdote to show that the European Commission’s bureaucracy was worse than the Russians’.

One meeting was unexpected. I had intended to invite the Egyptian Foreign Minister for a bilateral at the United Nations Plaza Hotel. Unfortunately one of our officials misread the telephone number in the Directory of Delegations, and invited the Foreign Minister of Ethiopia. As our relations with Ethiopia were decidedly chilly at the time, this gentleman was startled but accepted immediately. When he was met at the lift by Crispin Tickell and Stephen Wall, the penny dropped immediately. ‘Oh God,’ said Crispin. ‘It’s the Ethiopian. I know him. It’s the wrong man.’

Our unwelcome guest was shuttled into a side room while I was given a quick primer on Ethiopia. He was then hustled in for a twenty-minute meeting from which he departed with a look of extreme bewilderment. A few years before, I am told, the Foreign Office summoned an equally bewildered East German Ambassador to a meeting, in place of his West German counterpart.

It was at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool in October that I emerged from relative obscurity as Chief Secretary of the Treasury to the full glare of my new position. This was not the first time I had addressed the conference, but it was my debut as a Cabinet minister. Anti-European feeling in the party was becoming stronger. One young girl got tremendous applause when she said that, at the age of nineteen, she knew more about what was good for the UK than a sixty-year-old fuddy-duddy like Jacques Delors. The pro-Europe former Home Secretary Leon Brittan, then Vice-Chairman of the European Commission, who was only half-attending on the platform, joined in the applause, but I don’t think he can have heard her remarks. If the Prime Minister had announced that she was taking us out of the EEC the majority of those in the hall would have cheered her to the echo.

It was against this background that I put forward the government’s European policy. Here is what I said, well before I was prime minister, and in view of all that has taken place since I make no apology for repeating it:

I am not someone who believes in Europe right or wrong. We must judge it on its merits. But a clear-eyed look at Britain’s national interest shows beyond doubt that we have benefited from Community membership … Fifty years ago, Europe was full of young people with knapsacks going off to fight. Now it is full of young people with haversacks going off on holiday. That is a better Europe …

Today, I would not change a word of that speech. Nor would I change what I said about economic and monetary union.

It means different things to different people … So far, the discussion has centred on only one set of ideas. They would involve an end to national currencies, to independent national central banks and to national control over fiscal policy … We can’t accept these ideas but there are other ideas to discuss and we will put them forward.

We did, but alas, as time has shown, we were too late.

At CHOGM in Kuala Lumpur later that month, South Africa and the question of sanctions were the main sources of conflict, as we knew they would be. The UK opposed sanctions, believing them to be counterproductive. Everyone else supported them. There was no natural meeting point.

Margaret Thatcher tried to head off the expected trouble. She met Dr Mahathir, the Malaysian Prime Minister and Chairman of the Conference, on the eve of the first session, urging that South Africa should not dominate the discussion. Her hopes, never strong, were not realised. Mahathir’s silence was more expressive than any reply.

On the first morning of conference, Margaret Thatcher – incensed at remarks made by other heads of government about South Africa at the formal opening – quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a figure known worldwide as an opponent of apartheid, on the perverse effect of sanctions. It was an effective, almost irresistible, debating point, but it was very provocative. Battle was joined. As the conference proceeded there was no sign of a conciliatory mood on policy towards South Africa, and a drafting committee of foreign ministers was set up to paper over our differences and agree a communiqué.