History of England 1-6

The bombing had occurred in the midst of negotiations with the Irish Republic. While it was generally agreed that nothing should divert this process, Thatcher was in no humour for what she called ‘appeasement’. Her Irish counterpart, Garret FitzGerald, was a genial, well-meaning man, but he too had the sensibilities of his people to consider. Time and again, Thatcher ruled out any talk of an executive, or even consultative, role for the Republic in the affairs of the Province. The truth was that she understood little of Ireland or of its history. On one occasion she wondered aloud whether the Catholics might not be better off moving to the Republic. Hadn’t that been done before? Yes, but under Cromwell, it was pointed out. The Unionists, moreover, were largely excluded from the process, a fact that the Reverend Ian Paisley was not slow to allude to.

But still the process continued, until on 15 November 1985 the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed. The concessions now appear cosmetic; at the time they were radical. The Irish were given their cherished ‘consultative role’ in the Province, while accepting that there could be no change to its constitution unless the majority of the population should desire one. That possibility seemed remote to the British, but less so to their Irish counterparts, who knew that the demographics of the Province had begun to tilt towards such an eventuality.

While Thatcher evinced little concern for the Province, her opposite number in Washington cared a great deal. Ronald Reagan had been the chief spur to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The two politicians were very different beasts. Reagan had won his position by conjoining an easy, unaffected charm and an equally easy patriotism, but a keen intellect was not his distinctive trait. In later years, when asked why she had held in such high esteem a man whom she would never have appointed to her cabinet, Thatcher replied: ‘Because Ron has an instinctive understanding of the greatness and destiny of America.’ As cold warriors, they were popularly supposed to be inseparable, but here their approaches differed. For Thatcher, the West’s nuclear deterrent was an indispensable guarantor of both freedom and peace. Had not the doctrine of mutually assured destruction kept the great Bear in his cage? For Reagan, nuclear missiles were at best a necessary evil. He was heard to exclaim at meetings, ‘Why don’t we just abolish nuclear weapons?’

Many asked the same question. One of the most effective of the anti-nuclear protests came from a group that became known as ‘the women of Greenham Common’, who combined the recently rediscovered authority of their sex with a fierce antagonism to nuclear weaponry. Their protest arose from the arrival in England of American cruise missiles; these were stationed at RAF Greenham Common, in Berkshire, which became the focus of mass demonstration when in 1982 the women set up an extended camp, intending to remain as long as the rockets stayed in position. On 1 April 1983, the women formed a human chain around the site, which caught the world’s imagination. The camp settled into something like a mini city, with different quarters for different groups. It was a long wait, of some nineteen years, and the camp was not disbanded until 2000. In the end, the missiles were removed from Greenham Common as the result of a nuclear treaty between the United States and the then Soviet Union, but the women refused to leave until a memorial for their achievement was set up. Had they succeeded? In any direct sense, the answer must be no. But they set a new, strange and deeply English example of peaceful rejection of power.

It was Thatcher who first struck a mattock into the ice of the Cold War. In February 1984, Yuri Andropov, the ageing premier of the USSR, died. Thatcher attended his funeral, where she impressed the Politburo and the Russian people with her dignity and courtesy. She also formed a new acquaintance, one Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, a man, as she said, ‘she could do business with’. It helped that Gorbachev had defied precedent by bringing his wife. Konstantin Chernenko succeeded Andropov only to follow him into the grave, and Gorbachev was appointed in his place. The empire he had inherited was vast in scope but sick with senescence. Its economy was doubly vulnerable: firstly, oil and gas accounted for half its exports. Secondly, in order to keep pace with the United States, it was obliged to spend a vast percentage of its GDP on defence. These disadvantages might have counted for less had its once legendary technological initiative not atrophied since the Sixties. In sum, having run out of ideas, the USSR was beginning to run out of money and will.