In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to détente.
I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.
I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.
In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.
On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, this would not do. As Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the more politically conducive Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of The Economist’s, Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters, one of the founders of the National Association for Freedom set up to combat overweening trade union power, and destined to be a best-selling novelist, Robert turned out to be an ideal choice.
The speech which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defence at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’. It also offered an analysis of Soviet intentions different from that of the proponents of détente.
Russia is ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. In any case, if they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.
The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The Daily Telegraph entitled its editorial comment ‘The Truth About Russia’. The Times admitted that ‘there has been complacency in the West’. Nor was the Soviet reaction long in coming. The Soviet Embassy wrote a letter to Reggie Maudling, and the Ambassador called on the Foreign Office to protest in person. A stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs. But it was some apparatchik in the office of Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, his imagination surpassing his judgement, who coined the description of me as ‘The Iron Lady’.
It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the Western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time of the most grotesque misjudgements. This was one of them. When Gordon Reece read on the Press Association tapes what Red Star had said he was ecstatic and rushed into my office to tell me about it. I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent. They never did me a greater favour.
A few days later I visited the British Army on the Rhine, where my Kensington speech ensured me a warm reception. I was photographed driving a tank, which did me no harm at all at home either. What the outside world did not know was that in the course of this visit my career almost ended even more dramatically than it was to in November 1990.
Cranley Onslow, one of the Party’s Defence spokesmen, Richard Ryder and I were shown aboard an elderly two-engine propeller-driven transport aircraft to fly from the British base at Rheindalen to Oerlinghausen where we were to stay the night. (The plan had been to fly by helicopter, but the weather was not good enough.) Shortly after take-off I took my draft speech out of my briefcase and started to work on it. Some time later I became conscious of an irregularity in the noisy drumming of the engines. It was cold in the cabin. Outside there was thick freezing fog, and looking more closely I could see ice forming on the wings. At this point one of the crew came back to say that there was a problem and we would have to return to Rheindalen. I could sense from his manner that it was serious and I pressed to know exactly what the trouble was. It turned out that with the fog so thick the pilot could not be sure of his bearings. There was more. We were apparently now flying blind through a range of mountains. This was why the pilot had kept our speed to the minimum, slowing until the aircraft threatened to stall, in the hope that the fog might break and he could see his way out of trouble. Worse still, the instrument measuring our air speed had failed. I stopped working on the speech and put it away carefully in my briefcase, leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about matters even more important than politics. Somehow, we managed to get back to Rheindalen. I was never more relieved to feel tarmac under my feet.