‘We are neither pro-Russia nor pro-America,’ said Indira Gandhi, back in power and watching the Afghan war. ‘Just pro-India.’ She ruled with her son Sanjay, now MP and general secretary of Congress, and clearly her heir. But on 23 June 1980 he took out an aeroplane from the Delhi Flying Club; looping the loop over his office, his chappal shoes became entangled with the pedals and the plane crashed. Indira rushed to the scene and saw his mutilated body; it took doctors three hours to reconstruct it so that it could be displayed. Her sangfroid was invincible: when a relative wept, Indira said, ‘Now now, puphi, we don’t cry.’
Four days later she was back at her desk, but with Sanjay gone she turned to her eldest son Rajiv as heir. He was happily married to Antonia Maino, a pretty builder’s daughter from near Turin, who, knowing nothing of India, had worked as an au pair in England and then as a flight attendant, which was when she met Rajiv, a pilot. ‘As our eyes met, I could feel my heart pounding,’ she recalled. ‘Love at first sight.’ Taking the name Sonia, she worked as a picture restorer and quickly became Indira’s favourite. ‘I don’t know much about politics,’ Rajiv said. ‘But Mummy had to be helped.’
Soon afterwards in April 1981, Indira flew to London to discuss Afghanistan with another female leader.
‘People think it strange Mrs Gandhi and I got on so well personally,’ said Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister. Gandhi, pro-Soviet socialist, and Thatcher, anti-Communist conservative, were opposites, though they had much in common, both graduates of Somerville College, Oxford, both natural commanders in war and peace, women who had succeeded in male worlds. ‘I am in no sense a feminist,’ wrote Indira, ‘but I believe in women being able to do everything.’ Thatcher agreed: ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they?’ she said. ‘And I don’t blame them.’ When Thatcher said Indira ‘had this combination of things of being both very feminine but nevertheless capable of making very tough decisions’, she could have been talking about herself. And like Indira, it took a war to make her.
On 2 April 1982, Argentina, long ruled by military dictators who had killed or ‘disappeared’ thousands of leftists over recent decades, invaded and seized a distant British possession, the Falkland Islands. Within three days, Thatcher had mustered and dispatched a task force that sailed 8,000 miles to retake the islands. When an Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, sailed into what Thatcher had declared to be an exclusion zone, she ordered its sinking, a decision that removed the Argentine navy from the battle. On 21 May, British forces landed; on 14 June, the capital fell. The operation had been a risk. Before the war, her premiership had looked doomed. Instead she had pulled off every leader’s dream: a short, victorious war. Yet she was a born war leader. ‘You can’t retake islands I’m afraid without loss of life,’ she told a schoolboy interviewer (this author) in Downing Street soon afterwards. ‘We lost 255 lives in Falklands. The Russians shot down a Korean airliner and lost 269 lives in one act.’ The victory restored confidence in her vision of British exceptionalism: ‘I don’t believe you can be over-patriotic when you stand for a country that stands for honesty, integrity, freedom, justice.’
Thatcher, née Margaret Roberts, was a Grantham grocer’s daughter who graduated from Oxford as a chemist and became a barrister. Cleverer than most of her opponents, mastering her briefs and dominating her male colleagues and rivals, she was both a radical, favouring the brashness of self-made entrepreneurs, and socially conservative. Her operatically posh accent, her bouffant blonde hairstyle, her swinging handbag became props of her theatrical regality. She prided herself on her industry and energy, surviving on just four hours’ sleep a night. ‘I was born that way, I was trained that way,’ she told this author. ‘I’ve gone on acting that way … You must be born fairly fit and then you must train yourself to work extremely hard. I’d need to sleep a lot more than I do if I made a habit of more sleep.’ Long married to a whisky-snifting golf-playing retired company director, she, like Indira, shamelessly favoured a jackanapes son.
During the 1970s, Britain had joined the European Economic Community (later the European Union), but membership had not stopped a steep spiral of decline, as unemployment soared, overmighty trade unions bullied employers, who themselves were stuck in an obsolete culture, and Irish terrorists, the Provisional IRA, launched a murderous campaign, partly funded by Qaddafi. Elected in 1979, Thatcher confronted the unions, deregulated the stock market and promoted ‘self-reliance, initiative, hard work’, a new confidence in entrepreneurial energy and a patriotic view of Britain’s democratic and imperial past: ‘In this enormous empire we tried to take the best of our law and the best of our honesty to nations we administered. It wasn’t a bad record.’ But she never saw herself as Churchillian: ‘No one can see themselves as Churchill. That would be too arrogant and conceited for words … but he saw clearly, warned clearly, acted clearly, and I try to do the same.’ If Indira was her avatar as warrior-queen, Reagan was her geopolitical partner. Reagan and Thatcher performed on a political stage dominated by television, a media that would never have worked for earlier leaders: ‘I can’t remember Churchill ever doing a TV interview,’ mused Thatcher. She and Regan mastered the medium, henceforth essential for all leaders in all systems.*
Closely allied to Reagan, Thatcher surveyed a world that appeared to be unchangeably divided between the Soviets and the Americans; it is easy to forget that Iberian democracy was new and that half of Europe was still ruled by Leninist dictators. On 23 February 1981, a conspiracy of 200 Spanish soldiers, led by a colonel, tried to halt Spain’s advance to democracy. They attacked the Cortes (parliament), seized hostages and fired shots while officers sent tanks on to the streets of other cities, in a bid to restore Francoist dictatorship in the name of the king. After eighteen hours, at 1.15 in the morning, Juan Carlos, wearing the uniform of a captain-general, addressed the nation: ‘The Crown won’t tolerate the interruption by force of the democratic process.’ It was ‘my decisive moment and I knew what to do’, he told the author.
In the east, the Communist dictatorships were grimly permanent and sometimes still capable of murderous terror. In December 1981, Enver Hoxha unleashed a terror against his own comrades that culminated in the deaths of the prime minister and two other ministers – all thanks to a love affair between two teenagers.
Regarding himself as the sole judge of Marxist virtue, Hoxha feuded first with his Yugoslav backer Tito, then denounced Khrushchev and embraced Mao before rejecting Deng’s reforms, making a cult out of his righteous isolation and building a network of 170,000 fortifications to repel capitalistic and heretical invaders. As cultists expressed loyalty with the Hoxhaist Salute – right fist to the heart – he supervised every detail of Albanian life, backed by the ferocious Sigurimi secret police. In August that year, Hoxha’s trusted henchman Mehmet Shehu, who had been premier for twenty-seven years, was visited by his son Skender, who told his father he was in love with a pretty volleyball player, Silva Turdiu. They were going to marry. ‘Oh dear, why did you get involved with them?’ asked the premier, knowing that Silva was related to a writer who had mocked Hoxha for secret homosexuality, not least with the line ‘Glory to your ass, oh dandy!’