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made concessions, led to the constitutional conference at Lancaster House and the
eventual peaceful transference of power to an independent Zimbabwe on 17 April 1980.
The Rhodesian question was merely the introduction to Mrs Thatcher’s prickly
relationship with the Commonwealth, which was to erupt into extreme turbulence six
years later at the Nassau Conference in 1985, dominated by the controversy over
sanctions against South Africa as a means of ending apartheid and minority rule. Even
before Nassau, a cost-cutting exercise by the Thatcher administration had upset both
Queen and Commonwealth. Previously students from Commonwealth countries had
come to Britain for university education on the same basis as British undergraduates. In
1979, within six months of the Thatcher Government taking office, it was announced
that differential overseas student fees would be introduced, higher than those for British
undergraduates; from 1983 they were to pay the full rate. To the fury of both the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Commonwealth itself, the Ministry of
Education announced the decision with no previous consultation. It worried and upset
Elizabeth deeply, as she confessed with unprecedented frankness to Commonwealth
representatives. Mrs Thatcher’s economizing had hacked at the roots of the British
connection and the cultural basis of the English-speaking Commonwealth. As a member
of the Commonwealth Secretariat said:
It was totally destructive because one of the things about the Commonwealth is that all the ruling groups
have been educated here. In the early ‘70s you’d have, say, ten Prime Ministers around the table who knew
each other as students in Britain, because they all went to the LSE [London School of Economics] or
Cambridge, Oxford and so on. And she [Thatcher] wiped that out… Now you have the situation where
European students are treated as if they were natives of this country. They all come from rich countries
whereas students from the developing nations do not, so people have stopped coming to Great Britain. Many
of them go to the United States… even Germany is giving out a lot of scholarships… We encourage people to
go to India. 16
From the Nassau Conference onwards, Mrs Thatcher handbagged the Commonwealth
heads of government at their biennial meetings. Thatcher’s position was that imposing
sanctions on South Africa would harm British exports and throw black South Africans out
of work. The leaders of the Commonwealth, both black and white, took the view that
the sanctions were an important weapon in the battle to end apartheid. Discussions
became acrimonious and personal, particularly when it came to issuing press
communiqués. Mrs Thatcher either, as at Kuala Lumpur, issued a separate text
contradicting what the other members of the conference believed had been agreed, or,
as at Nassau, publicly belittled the concessions she had made, when in a television
interview she told the press that she had only made a teeny-weeny concession,
accompanying this statement by a graphic gesture. She quarrelled both with Malcolm
Fraser at Lusaka and with his successor, Bob Hawke, the Labour Party leader, at Kuala
Lumpur in 1989, when she summoned a press conference and publicly disassociated
herself from the previously agreed communiqué on South African sanctions.
Elizabeth was aware of Commonwealth unhappiness with Mrs Thatcher’s stand and