Margaret Thatcher 'wanted a whites-only South Africa'

International Desk: Margaret Thatcher wanted to ‘push’ Vietnamese boat people into the sea, ‘loathed’ Germans, and believed South Africa should become a whites-only state.

She disliked men with moustaches because they ‘looked like hairdressers’ – and may have quit as Prime Minister because of husband Denis’s heavy drinking.

That is the controversial portrait painted of her in a new book by Sir Patrick Wright, who was head of the Diplomatic Service at the end of Thatcher’s Downing Street years and at the start of John Major’s term in office. His diaries give a vivid account of her bitter clashes with her Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe – she described him as ‘that old bumbler’ behind his back.

Wright’s diaries reveal his shock at the former PM’s views on apartheid. ‘She wanted a return to pre-1910 South Africa, with a white mini-state partitioned from neighbouring black states. When I argued this would be an extension of apartheid, she barked, “Do you have no concern for our strategic interests?” ’

He also claims that Thatcher was ‘at her worst’ during 1989’s Vietnamese boat people crisis. He says Howe told him she favoured ‘a policy of “pushing off” – refusing to allow them to land, oblivious of appalling implications… with photographs of sinking boats and drowning children’.

Months before Thatcher was forced to resign in 1990, Wright’s diaries note Whitehall gossip about Denis’s heavy drinking and ‘worries that this could be a reason for herto give up early’. It hints she may have had a drink problem too.

Source: dailymail.co.uk


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