God and Mrs Thatcher (41 page)

In 1975, speaking to the Anglo-British Pilgrim Society in London, not long before Reagan would first bid for the White House, he set out what he considered to be the choice facing the world: ‘Either we continue the concept that man is a unique being capable of determining his own destiny with dignity and God-given inalienable rights … or we admit we are faceless ciphers in a godless collectivist ant heap.’
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His critics may have dismissed his understanding as simplistic while admirers may have praised his assured principles, nonetheless there was little doubt that Reagan’s world-view was shaped and articulated in Christian terms.

As Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyla was one of many priests to defy the communist regime in Poland, but this was done not through open hostility, rather with subtle negotiation. Wojtyla’s experience of living under communist repression made him pessimistic of détente and especially of theologians’ enthusiasm for using Marxism as a learning tool for Christian ethics.
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Margaret Thatcher had made her position on communism clear long before she delivered the speech in 1976, which would famously earn her the title of ‘Iron Lady’ by the Soviet Defence Ministry’s paper, the
Red Star
. In 1950, on the eve of the Korean War, in a New Year message to her Dartford constituents, Margaret Roberts had channelled her best Churchillian rhetoric: ‘We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life. Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people. We must firstly
believe
in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly.’
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Almost immediately on becoming Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher established herself as a sceptic of détente and critical of the ‘gullible disarmers’ who naively followed such a course.
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‘I am also for
attente
… for not letting down our guard; for keeping our powder dry,’ she told the Pilgrims of the United States in New York in September 1975, barely a month after the Helsinki Accords had been signed.
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She reinforced this message back home a year later in her infamous ‘Iron Lady’ speech at Kensington Town Hall: ‘They [Soviets] put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.’
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Quite why Thatcher was determined to present herself as a hawk so early on in her leadership may have been because she was a novice in foreign policy; talking tough afforded the new female Conservative leader some much needed gravitas. But she was also articulating an opinion she had long held. Like most, Thatcher did not foresee the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, but unlike most, she was prepared to talk as if it should (and could) one day be a reality.

If one were to compare the contributions of this Western trio – the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister – Margaret Thatcher was
the least important in helping to bringing the Cold War to an end. She could however claim credit as a conciliator rather than as an aggressor in initiating a dialogue with Mikhail Gorbachev and opening up diplomatic links with faint-hearted members of the Warsaw Pact (Thatcher was the first Western Cold War leader to touch down on Ukrainian, Hungarian and Siberian soil). Nor should Thatcher’s contribution to the propaganda offensive be underestimated either. Early on in her premiership, her speechwriter and expert on Eastern Europe, George Urban had pressed on her the need to adopt a tone of ‘moral outrage rather than cool reason’.
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Urban’s view, one with which Thatcher readily concurred, was that the West in the 1970s had lacked the self-confidence of the Soviets and had been shy in asserting its values, particularly on democracy and freedom. Urban’s idea of an ideological counter-offensive certainly appealed to Thatcher; she had always dismissed the notion that there was any moral equivalence between the USSR and the West. More than any British leader since Churchill, Thatcher was willing to elevate the Cold War into one about ideas and values. ‘I’m perfectly prepared to fight that battle,’ Thatcher said in enthusing tones to Urban. ‘We’ve got all the truth on our side and all the right arguments.’
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In 1983, still basking in her Falklands triumph, Margaret Thatcher used the occasion of her acceptance speech for the Winston Churchill Foundation Award in Washington, to assert the Cold War as one chiefly of ideas not weapons:

On this occasion, Thatcher had specific reason for revving up the ideological war rather than the arms race, for Reagan had recently
announced the Strategic Defence Initiative, of which Thatcher was privately sceptical.
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Margaret Thatcher’s linguistic style though always went down better with the Americans than it did back home. Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey thought Thatcher ‘an ignorant and opinionated demagogue’, while
The Guardian
served up a fearful assessment: ‘There is not just Churchill in her rhetoric; there is Harry before Agincourt, even Richard the Lionheart, setting out for the Holy War with Saladin.’
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Thatcher’s crusading language was all well and good, but even she realised that it was not a serious diplomatic strategy. In the early 1980s, the hope in the West was that communism would be defeated from within. Encouraging dissent movements within the Eastern bloc had always been Western policy but this was pursued with pressing urgency with the rise of Solidarity in Poland. Led by pious electrician Lech Wałęsa, Solidarity was an independent trade union federation, which had a membership of ten million (a quarter of the population) and used civil resistance methods to advance the cause of workers’ rights against the state. Poland, though, represented a unique case. Never fully communist (the rural peasants were still landholders), its identity had formed against centuries of successive foreign creeds and occupation, and, more specifically, as a bastion of Roman Catholicism in Eastern Europe made all the more resonant with the recent election of a Polish-born Pope. The huge crowds that greeted Pope John Paul II on his visit to his homeland in 1979 had been greeted with panic in Moscow and excitement in Washington.

Solidarity drew much of its inspiration, symbolism and leadership from the Catholic Church. It was in essence a Catholic social movement, which is one of the main reasons why Arthur Scargill publicly came out against it. At the dock of Gdansk, the home of the movement, murals of the Virgin Mary and John Paul II were set against the backdrop of Solidarity’s colours of red and white. Polish Catholic leaders
stood shoulder-to-shoulder with workers in a unity that partly reflected the strength of ties between Polish nationalism and Catholicism but also the weakening authority of the crumbling communist state. Pope John Paul II knew all too well of the sustained interrogation and abuse that the Roman Catholic Church suffered in his homeland. For this and for many other reasons, Solidarity was a social resistance movement to which the Vatican willingly lent its support – both financial and verbal – unlike to those priests fighting for social justice in other parts of the world.

Many in the West, especially Ronald Reagan, were convinced that religion might prove to be the Soviet Union’s ‘Achilles heel’ and there was genuine hope that Poland’s Christian-inspired resistance movement could pave the way.
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In a sign of support, Washington substantially increased investment in their propaganda service, Radio Free Europe, which also regularly broadcast Mass. It also channelled funds to Solidarity, although admittedly these were paltry sums compared to the funding sent to the Mujahideen to help their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the Polish government, weakened by food shortages, strikes and protests, declared martial law in 1981, Reagan, in a unilateral move took the bold step of imposing sanctions on the whole of the Eastern Bloc.

As Britain’s closest ally in the East, and with substantial investments in Poland, the Foreign Office wished to tread a cautious line with respect to Solidarity. Thatcher, though, always gave her uncompromising support to a movement she believed to be the perfect showcase of revolt against communist tyranny. She was copied into all telegrams from the British embassy in Warsaw and studiously scribbled all over them. Reagan’s move on sanctions, however, put Thatcher in an impossible situation; it put at risk millions of pounds of business and jobs at a time when the British economy was in dire straits. Reagan had, in effect, used the situation in Poland as an opportunity to attempt to economically freeze out the Russians through industrial sanctions; his specific aim was to halt the
production of the Siberian gas line – the export of American grain, for example, was not halted. The problem from Thatcher’s perspective, and shared by her European allies who also had substantial economic interests at stake, was that American policy threatened to harm the European economy as much as that of the Soviet Union. After a year, a compromise was eventually reached with Washington, but the whole episode had revealed the contradictions, self-interest and above all pragmatism rather than Christian solidarity that governed the politics of the Cold War.

The Polish government limped on, outlawing Solidarity in 1982 and combining this with the more fearful tactics of tanks, bullets and beatings, including the murder of the outspoken priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who was killed by the secret police in 1984. His funeral attracted over 250,000 mourners and his grave soon became a shrine, to which Pope John Paul, Reagan and Thatcher would later pay homage. By the time that Thatcher visited Poland in 1988, the government had been forced to change its tack. The shipyard of Gdansk, the home of Solidarity, was being closed down in the name of ‘economic efficiency’; a tactic of curtailing union power with which Margaret Thatcher herself was intimately familiar.

On the day that the British Prime Minister arrived, however, the rusting dockyards were overrun with cheering crowds, men clinging onto cranes waving their arms and Solidarity flags, even anti-Scargill placards. ‘I knew I had to come and feel the spirit of Poland for myself,’ Thatcher said, purposefully dressed in a green (Aquascutum) coat, the colour of hope in Poland. The workers had come out in force, but it was not the British Prime Minister they were shouting for, but Solidarity, in the hope that such images beamed round the world would finally shame the Polish government into submission.

After her reception at Gdansk, Margaret Thatcher attended a service at St Brygida’s, the spiritual HQ of Solidarity, which had also acted as a sanctuary for leaders of the movement. The congregation applauded as Thatcher entered and spontaneously burst into a rendition of ‘Give
us back free Poland’. As she listened intently, tears could clearly be seen in Thatcher’s eyes. Over lunch, she advised union leader Wałęsa that popularity without a plan of action was pointless. Wałęsa immediately interjected: ‘If you have a free society under the rule of law, it produces both dignity of the individual and prosperity.’ Thatcher could not contain herself: ‘Stop, Stop, Mr Wałęsa, this is music to my ears, wonderful, your government should hear this.’ Wałęsa gently raised a finger to the chandelier directly above the dining table, ‘Do not worry, Mrs Thatcher, they are hearing every word.’
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As Thatcher was whisked out of Gdansk in a small boat, the shipyard cranes bowed in salute.
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Two months later, Solidarity was recognised as an independent labour union and in the subsequent elections of 1989, won nearly all the seats in the Polish Parliament. In a small but significant way, Margaret Thatcher had played a part by recognising Polish resistance to communist tyranny. It was no surprise that Lech Wałęsa could later be found amongst the congregation on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013.

IF ONE WERE
to take a long-term view, John Paul II’s tour of Britain in 1982 was the most significant diplomatic event of the 1980s. In terms of historic symbolism, the first visit by a reigning Pope since the Reformation certainly trounced Thatcher’s tête-à-tête with Gorbachev and her infamous speech against European federalism in Bruges. That the visit is not traditionally seen in this light is perhaps because it signified the cessation rather than the beginning of something, but that end was no small feat: the 450-year-old conflict between Canterbury and Rome.

Archbishop Runcie had first broached the idea of a visit when he had met Pope John Paul II in Accra in 1980, but it was Cardinal Hume,
as head of the Roman Catholic Church, who issued the formal invitation given that it was to be a pastoral rather than a state visit. Personal meetings between the head of the Catholic Church and the head of the Anglican Communion dated back to the 1960s when Archbishop Fisher was the first to break with history and call on Pope John XXIII in Rome, although it had not been an official welcome and the Vatican pointedly insisted on referring to the archbishop as ‘Dr Fisher’. By the time that Paul VI welcomed his successor, Archbishop Ramsey, the second Vatican Council had issued its decree on ecumenism and the stage was set for the announcement of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) which aimed at putting ecumenical dialogue on a solid footing and settling the theological divisions between the churches. The meeting did not run entirely smoothly though; Ian Paisley and his band of protestors had been on the same plane as the archbishop and proceeded to stage a demonstration in their ‘Archbishop Ramsey traitor to Protestant Britain’ shirts at the airport.

A further nudge towards re-approachment came in 1977 when Archbishop Coggan and Paul VI signed a joint declaration on unity but as yet no pope had set foot on British soil. Runcie was very keen for John Paul II’s visit to go ahead; he saw it as a necessary seal of approval for ARCIC, whose report, published in 1981, seemed to pave the way for closer union, if not full communion, between the two churches. Runcie also wished to see the Pope publicly demonstrate respect for Anglicanism, which he felt was not always accorded due status in Rome, and he hoped that John Paul II might revoke the 1896 papal bull nullifying Anglican orders. Runcie later admitted that he had doubts about John Paul II, particularly his conservatism on sexual matters and women in the church, which Runcie considered stemmed from the ‘Mediterranean male conservative’ atmosphere of the Vatican. The divisions were felt to be so extreme that some in Lambeth feared that the visit would reveal divisions rather than harmony between Catholicism and Anglicanism.
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