Margaret Thatcher

David Cannadine: Margaret Thatcher: A Life and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 55, Number 3, June 2018. Republished with permission.

 

Concluding this incisive biography of “the undisputed alpha female of her generation,” David Cannadine observes, “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.” So she did, first transforming her conservative Party, then using it as an instrument to excise her country’s slowly metastasizing post-imperial funk, diagnosed in her tart 1979 campaign slogan, “Labour Isn’t Working.”

Getting to work was exactly what Margaret Hilda Roberts like to do. Her father, a grocer, active in local politics and civic assiociations in the provincial market town of Grantham, Lincolnshire, was a Liberal in the English sense of the word: a political heir of John Locke and his esteem for civil and economic liberty. The way of life in a Lockean republic has been described as a joyless quest for joy, but joylessness does not preclude satisfaction; hardworking and religious, the Robertses led sober and productive lives and prized education, sacrificing to send their daughter to Somerville College, Oxford, where her diligence earned her “a sound secon-class degree”in chemistry. “We were Methodists, and Methodist means method,” she recalled, pointedly.

Before graduated in 1947, Miss Roberts rose to the presidency of the Oxford Conservative Association, making connections with the national party and exercising her (as it turned out) very considerable gift for debate. The Party indulged the ambitious young stalwart, permitting her to run twice for Parliament as a sacrificial lamb in a district firmly controlled by the Labour Party. In 1951 she did what so many successful politicians do; as the old saw goes, she ‘married above herself.’ Denis Thatcher was an army veteran, the manager of his family’s successful manufacturing concern (household and industrial chemicals). “Much richer” than his bride, Mr. Thatcher had both business sense and a bit of dash; “he drove a Jaguar.” From then on Mrs. Thatcher could devote her full attention to politics—characteristically training herself for it by obtaining a law degree and qualifying for the bar.

The year 1958 saw her diligence rewarded, as she won the Conservative Party nomination for a safe seat in the “moderately prosperous, petit-bourgeois, owner-occupied London suburb” of Finchley. The Conservative administration of Harold Macmillan was still dealing with the political aftermath of the Suez Canal War, during which Britain and France learned that their great wartime ally, the United States, did not invariably return Cold-War loyalty with indulgence toward habits of empire long ingrained in the European republics. Thatcher ‘grew up’ as an MP in the atmosphere of great-power rivalry in which her country could no longer claim great-power status. This realization led to the inward-turning rule of Labour from 1964 until the end of the decade In those years, Mrs. Thatcher held a variety of shadow-cabinet positions, in each instance taking the opportunity to learn the business of the relevant departments in preparation for debate in Commons. She was being apprenticed, although her superiors doubtless assumed that she would be limited in her rise. She was, after all, a woman in a man’s game.

When the Conservatives returned in 1970, the eleven-year veteran of Parliament was given the post of Secretary of State for Education. She dutifully fought for more money in the budget, although she found “the ethos of the department” to be (as she put it) “self-righteously socialist.” Her colleagues may have returned her distaste. When she proposed abolishing the school milk program as a cost-cutting measure, no one in the department warned her that this might make her controversial; “Mrs. Thatcher, the mild-snatcher” found herself pilloried by Labourites and their allied journalists. One might be permitted to think that she should have seen it coming, but it turned out to be a rare political misstep. Prime Minister Edward “Ted” Heath restrained himself from sacking her, and she lived to fight on.

Heath and the Conservatives themselves got the sack from the electorate in 1974. The Labour Party, under the lackluster stewardship of prime ministers Harold Wilson and James “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, presided over a half-decade of rising inflation and unemployment. Coached by think-tank director Keith Joseph, Thatcher began studying the works of Hayek and Friedman, and headed a portion of the Conservative Party which eschewed the paternalist/aristocratic heritage that saw in the welfare state a sort of extension of ancient landlord-tenant relations. This split the party between the traditionalist Conservatives (now called the ‘Wets’), and the Thatcherites, who startlingly resembled the Liberals of her father’s generation. So armed, intellectually, she defeated Heath for leadership of the Party (he never forgave her, but that came increasingly not to matter), and then took her party to victory in the general elections, scoring Labour for failing to deliver jobs to the workers it represented but even more for the spiritlessness of life under social democracy. She had not believed a woman would rise to the office of prime minister in her lifetime; with the unintended help of her enemies in and out of the Conservative Party, she proved herself wrong.

Monetarism, tax cuts, and welfare-state retrenchment initially made things worse, as unemployment rose and urban riots agitated the ‘Wets,’ then as always fearing for “the social fabric of the nation.” Fortunately for her, Labour chose a literatus to lead it. Michael Foot was precisely the sort of fuzzy-headed, disarmament-minded socialist intellectual George Orwell had delighted to lampoon, and in debate Thatcher dined out on him. Although things looked bad for Conservatives by 1983, victory in the Falklands War proved a political tonic, and its effects lasted long enough for her liberal reforms to take hold, including a broad-scale sell-off of nationalized industries, which raised revenues lost by the tax cuts. Perhaps the most successful of these was the program of incentives to induce renters to own their own homes, which not only caused money to circulate more freely but turned a substantial number of voters into property owners less likely to smile at taxation supporting the welfare state. Between 1983 and 1990, Britain added three million new jobs; between 1981 and 1987, average wages rose three percent per annum. “Instead of being a nation of unionized producers, Britain was becoming, as Thatcher hoped it would, a nation of individualized consumers.” Low inflation and low interest rates made Britain “one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Community” by 1986.

Conservatives won re-election in 1984 and again in 1987. As Cannadine remarks, with perhaps a shade too much breathlessness, “no one man had achieved so many victories since before the Great Reform Act of 1832, and for a woman to have done so was even more remarkable.” Still, a decade is a long time in republic politics. By 1989, the Prime Minister had saddled herself and her party with an unpopular poll tax, and the needed shift from an industrial to a service economy had caused economic hardship for many citizens distant from London and its financial economy. The ‘Wets’ still hated her, and many of the younger Conservative MPs had no contact with her. Her approval ratings in polls declined to twenty percent as the economy showed signs of stalling out, again. Her cabinet split over her refusal to join a proposed European currency, and she resigned after it became clear that her former Cabinet colleague, Michael Heseltine (who had opposed the poll tax) would defeat her in a contest for Party leadership.

In foreign policy, Thatcher proceeded unsentimentally. In Rhodesia and Hong Kong she cut her losses, leaving Rhodesian whites to the untender mercies of the Maoist tyrant-in-waiting, Robert Mugabe, and making the best deal she could with the Communist Chinese, who, like Lenin before them, didn’t mind some capitalist infusions of wealth so long as it could not threaten their rule. In one of the most important Commonwealth countries, South Africa, the rise of the African National Congress party raised her worries about another communist, or communist-leaning regime in the region, and she was late to recognize Nelson Mandela’s merits. But she was prescient regarding Europe. With British membership costing nearly one billion pounds by the late 1970s, she became “increasingly suspicious of the unelected and unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy,” and her quarrel over European integration with her own Chancellor of the Exchequer precipitated her eventual defeat, years later. Since then, as we know, many Britons have come round to her suspicions of European Union governance.

Her most important foreign-policy triumph came in 1982, 8000 miles from the United Kingdom, when Argentina captured the Falkland Islands, a land “settled by sheep farmers who were fiercely loyal to the crown.” The British Foreign Office had wanted to be rid of them, and tried to induce the 1,800 Falklanders to accept independence, but the preemptive Argentinian gambit stiffened English backs. Two months after the Argentine invasion, Thatcher ordered the British Navy to throw them out; in doing so, they (and behind them, she) saved Conservatives from likely defeat at the next general election. “She had saved Britain’s honor, avenged the failure of Suez, reversed national decline, and made the country great again”—or so it felt at the time, and for the time it was a real achievement. Britain was a country that needed a ‘win,’ and Thatcher got it one.

She proved equally firm in what turned out to be the endgame of the Cold War, where she partnered with the Reagan Administration in its ambition not merely to contain but to roll back the Soviet empire. She first visited America in the late 1960s, coming away not with an impression of a country in the grips of n unpopular war and ‘counterculture’ ferment, but of “entrepreneurial energy,” “belief in the free market,” and a spirit of “simultaneous pursuit of wealth and self-improvement.” Compared to stagnating Britain, even Great-Society America seemed an “an example of a governing and fiscal regime that was less intrusive in its reach and less punitive in its taxation.” “America’s values and aspirations bore a striking resemblance to those she had learned at her father’s knee, and the United States would become the model for what she wanted to achieve in Britain.” President Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” accordingly enthused rather than offended the Prime Minister. She faced down the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (another of Michael Foot’s ill-considered enthusiasms), spearheading European resistance to Soviet domination of Central Europe.

When Reagan ordered the invasion of communist-controlled Grenada, a Commonwealth country, without consulting his friend the Prime Minister, Thatcher coolly shrugged it off, concluding “that she must get even closer to him.” She was among the first to recognize Mikhail Gorbachev as a man “we could do business with,” although she seems not to have supposed that a real detente between the United States and the Soviet Union (in contrast to the false detente of the 1970s) would lead to the superpowers negotiating over the heads of her own government and those of the rest of Europe. When the Soviet empire finally fell, the Allies’ success brought her unexpected headaches. Not only was the newly-elected U. S. president George H. W. Bush less sympathetic to Thatcher and her policies than Reagan had been—Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ smacked of Tory ‘Wet’-ness more than Lockean liberalism—but the more-or-less consequent reunification of Germany brought a new economic and political powerhouse onto the Continental Plain, one that would, she foresaw, disrupt British relations within Europe and with her American allies. Her sudden departure from Downing Street saved her from needing to figure out what to do about the brave new world that had such creatures in it. Statesmen since her time have been trying to do that, with very middling success.

“Throughout her premiership, she was the dominant figure in British public life, and she not only made the political weather, but went some way towards changing the political climate, too,” doing “more than anyone else to disrupt the political consensus that had existed from 1945 to 1979” and “shift[ing] the centre ground of public debate to the right.” From then until now, “British politics on both the right and the left have largely played out in her shadow.” Her greater predecessor, Winston Churchill, had quite arguably saved the country as much as any one man could do, but his enduring legacy was in that alone, inasmuch as postwar Britain soon turned to a self-stultifying mixture of demi-socialist egalitarianism and international embarrassment. Lacking Churchill’s intellectual brilliance and greatness of soul, Margaret Thatcher still had the practical judgment and toughness needed in her own time, at the service of a Lockean liberalism well-suited for a longer and more peaceful journey beyond her own years in power.