Still, I felt no inhibitions about making my planned visit. India’s ambivalent relationship with the Soviet Union, its strategic significance, as well as the traditional links with Britain which provided huge sums of overseas aid, marked out India as of special importance to me. I did, however, insist that there should be no censorship of my press conferences and that I should be able to meet representatives of the opposition. No objection was made and both conditions were fulfilled. As a consequence, I found myself with a larger British press entourage than usual on these trips, partly because some British papers sent in reporters who would otherwise have been subject to the emergency censorship regulations. They wrote not only about my visit, but about the condition of India more generally, including the sterilization campaign.
I lunched with Indira Gandhi in her own modest home, where she insisted on seeing that her guests were all looked after and clearing away the plates while discussing matters of high politics. Both her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, were present, although it was the former who had most to say for himself. He had, indeed, allegedly been responsible for many of the abuses such as forced sterilization and compulsory rehousing which had provoked such bitter opposition. But in spite of everything I found myself liking Mrs Gandhi herself. Perhaps I naturally sympathized with a woman politician faced with the huge strains and difficulties of governing a country as vast as India. But, in spite of a long self-justificatory account she gave me of why the State of Emergency had been necessary, I could not approve of her Government’s methods. She had taken a wrong turning and was to discover the fact at her party’s devastating election defeat in 1977.
From India I flew to Singapore for a brief stopover on my way to New Zealand and Australia. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was an old friend from my days as Education Secretary. He and I thought similarly about education. He was a great believer in selection and could never understand why even a socialist wanted to destroy the grammar schools. And the schools and education in Singapore reflected this. More significantly, he was the most important Asian statesman of his generation, an achievement all the more remarkable for being based on the small state of Singapore. He had his own kind of democracy to be sure, but his strong commitment to free-market capitalism had done wonders for the tiny island which he governed. For me, the success of Singapore demonstrated how, given the right economic framework favourable to enterprise, living standards could be transformed. Not surprisingly, Professor Milton Friedman saw in economies like that of Singapore a model which the West should follow. Of course, Lee Kuan Yew enjoyed the advantage of the Chinese people’s cultural predisposition to trading and commerce: the spirit of entrepreneurship comes more easily to some peoples than to others. But I found in my discussions with him now that what really united us was common concern about the advance of Soviet influence throughout the region, which was being exerted through naval deployments disguised as trade or fishing. I was to find myself often relying on Lee Kuan Yew’s wise advice and vast knowledge of world politics in my time as Prime Minister.
From Singapore I went on to New Zealand. It was my second visit and I felt very much at home. Robert Muldoon had recently won a general election. He was a mixed grill of a politician: robust and no-nonsense in manner, but surprisingly confused in economic and political philosophy, and accordingly much more interventionist than the Labour Government which succeeded him eight years later. He was something of a bruiser alongside Malcolm Fraser, the tall rancher who in 1975 had become Prime Minister of Australia after the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, had controversially dismissed Gough Whitlam, the previous Labor Prime Minister. Although I was pleased to see a right-wing government in power in Australia as in New Zealand, I never struck up any real friendship with Malcolm Fraser. Our views and attitudes were too different.
Neither Bob Muldoon nor Malcolm Fraser was committed to the reforms required to create an effective free-enterprise economy. They were both shaped by political cultures which for almost all of this century had been built upon protectionist economics and an advanced welfare state. Ironically, within a decade the Labour Party began to dismantle radically these statist institutions in both countries. But it may be that when I arrived in 1976 public opinion had not yet shifted sufficiently to make this practical politics. I suspected this might be true when I delivered a speech to the Australian Liberal Party (the equivalent of the British Conservative Party) Federal Council in Canberra. I included in my speech some of the more philosophical assertions which I always inserted in such speeches in Britain. Indeed, I was extra keen to do so because I had been reading into the small hours Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, which I bought at the airport, and which made me reflect on the complex relationship between freedom and democracy. The applause at the end was far from deafening, and from the subsequent comments it became clear to me that conservative-minded audiences in Australia were not used to this sort of unapologetic conservatism.
Another straw in the wind was provided by my visit to Broken Hill, an outback town dominated and largely owned by the miners’ union. The union leaders were delighted and rather surprised to see me. They informed me proudly that no one could live or work in the town without belonging to the union. A bar in the town which had recently challenged the rule had simply been boycotted and forced to close down. My guides were completely unabashed, indeed perversely pleased, about this blatant infraction of liberty. I could not help wondering whether I had had an insight into Britain’s future.
One memory I treasure from this Australian visit was my only meeting with Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister for many years and a great friend of Britain. He was ailing and could no longer walk, but one saw immediately the power and strength of character of Australia’s leading statesman and former member of Churchill’s Imperial War Cabinet, though less of the sarcastic wit that had made him a famous political pugilist. I was flattered when he revealed that he had read most of my recent speeches, especially those warning against renewed aggression by the Soviet Union. I was reminded not for the last time that the political generation that had come to maturity when the British Empire was still a world power retained a global perspective that its more parochial successors lacked. When I found myself complimented by this remarkable man it strengthened me in my conviction that I was right and that the détente establishment was wrong.
I had the same kind of encouraging confirmation from a very different source in April the following year (1977) when I visited China. I was already much better known to the Chinese than they were to me. They had relished my Helsinki and Kensington speeches and regarded me as a valued recruit in opposition to what they described as Soviet ‘hegemonism’. My daughter Carol came too: she had decided to start her career in Australia and I had persuaded her to travel out via China. It was fun having her with me and she was a great antidote to too much official solemnity. There were two others in the party — one of my PPSs, John Stanley, and Douglas Hurd, who had served on the staff of our Embassy in Peking and had a vast store of knowledge and anecdote about China. Douglas christened us ‘the Gang of Four’.