Archive files show chancellor sought to reassure PM by offering to pass on ‘even matters which his cabinet would not know’



Helmut Kohl promised Margaret Thatcher secret access to “matters which even his cabinet would not know” in an attempt to reassure her about the dynamics of German reunification, newly released files reveal.

The pledge was made during a private meeting between the two politicians at Downing Street in March 1990 as world leaders came to terms with the new European order after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism.

British suspicion of a revitalised Germany ran deep in a Conservative government steeped in memories of two world wars, the files at the National Archives in Kew show.

Days before the Kohl-Thatcher summit, the prime minister had assembled prominent historians at Chequers for a confidential seminar on Germany which crudely characterised the country as exhibiting “angst, aggressiveness [and] bullying”.

The record of the private meeting between Kohl and Thatcher on 30 March contains a section labelled “Anglo-German contacts on unification”. It notes: “Chancellor Kohl said that he wanted to keep the prime minister personally informed of all his intentions about unification, so as to remove any possible source of misunderstanding or apprehension. He would pass on even matters which his cabinet would not know, subject always to the qualification there would inevitably be in unexpected developments.

“He would like to suggest that Charles Powell [Thatcher’s foreign affairs adviser] should meet with … members of the federal chancellery staff once a month in total discretion, with no announcement of such meetings. The prime minister said she was very grateful for this offer, which she would like to take up.”

Kohl’s determination to improve trust between London and Berlin came only a few days after the notorious Chequers seminar, the details of which were eventually leaked to the media, provoking political uproar, later that year.

A full text of the seminar is contained within the prime ministerial files, including a covering note from Powell warning that it would be “very embarrassing and gravely damaging to our interests if the contents of so frank a discussion of one of our closest allies were to become known”.

Those present along with Thatcher included the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, as well as the historians and commentators Gordon Craig, Fritz Stern, Norman Stone, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Timothy Garton-Ash and George Urban.

They began by talking about Germans and their characteristics, remarking that it was relevant to the “present discussion to think of the less happy ones”. Germans were said to be insensitive to the feelings of others, “most noticeable in their behaviour over the Polish border”, self-obsessed and “inclined to self-pity and a longing to be liked”.

The extraordinary accumulation of negative stereotypes continued: “Some even less flattering attributes were also mentioned as an abiding part of the German character: in alphabetical order, angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality.” A capacity to “overdo things” and “over-estimate their own strengths and capabilities” was also added to the list.

Modern Germans “were very different from their predecessors”, it was acknowledged, but the fact that a “cultured and cultivated nation” had previously been “brainwashed into barbarism” meant it could happen again.

Powell’s conclusion at the end of the seminar note was that “we should be nice to the Germans [although] even the optimists had some unease, not for the present and the immediate future, but for what might lie further down the road than we can yet see”.

The fluid state of international affairs provided Thatcher with an opportunity to stamp her mark on history with a speech that would resonate around the world.

In February, Powell had sent a note marked “secret: personal and private” to her loquacious defence procurement minister, Alan Clark. It said she was thinking of delivering a “Bruges II” address in the summer and would welcome ideas and material.

Clark observed that the prime minister was not properly deploying “the priceless asset of her own reputation” and said she should draw together all the strands of recent events and indicate the shape of a “grand design”, like Winston Churchill’s coining of the “iron curtain” phrase.

Clark suggested it would be the occasion to which “future historians would look back as marking the recognition of the west that the Iron Curtain has lifted”. It should not contain “flimflam” with which commentators and politicians “conceal their own puzzlement”.

The new era of a Thatcher-Gorbachev axis would be as important for the 1990s as the Thatcher-Reagan axis was for the 1980s, he mused. “The friendship of a new Russia will be of immense value in offsetting German ascendancy, in controlling Muslim irredentism and in defending the west against the … prospect of Sino-Japanese aggression.”

A note from Powell records that in May Clark was coming to Downing Street to talk to the prime minister about what she might say in her forthcoming lecture, Shaping a New Global Community, to be given in Aspen, Colorado.

“You have read his note,” Powell said, “and are unlikely to agree with his advice that you should champion a single currency and an independent European central bank.”