It was a remarkable relationship. Margaret [Thatcher] and I had a love/hate relationship. She was always defending the South African regime and we had some terrible fights, including an enormous one in Canada.

In sum, the truth is that we luxuriate in the comfortable assertion that women enjoy equality. We have salved our consciences by eliminating the more obvious discriminations like unequal rates of pay for work of equal value. But, in fact, we have not eliminated the inheritance of the millennia that women are lesser beings, an inheritance which still manifests itself in a whole range of prejudice and other forms of discrimination.

I really had very little to do with Pierre Trudeau. He was off the scene very soon.

The things which are most important don’t always scream the loudest.

The concept there was that the small number of developed countries within the Commonwealth should provide assistance. This was not just financial but personal, providing experts and so on, to assist less developed members of the Commonwealth to get on the growing path. And that was part of what we did with South Africa.

Geoffrey [Howe] and I were mates, and he disagreed with [ Margaret Thatcher] position. So, we cooperated surreptitiously.

I told [ David Lange] he was crazy, because you can't have an alliance relationship if you refuse access to their ships. And the Americans wanted to punish him very severely and I intervened there and softened them somewhat. They wanted to really take some tough, reactive measures to New Zealand.