Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  The best way to think of Thatcherism, then, is not as a philosophical dogma but as a loose mixture of themes, instincts and attitudes, rooted in the soil of Middle England and the long history of the Conservative Party. As her political adviser Alfred Sherman remarked, it had originated ‘less as a doctrine than as a mood’, defined by ‘beliefs and values’ rather than policies and pledges. But it was also a product of a very particular historical moment, the late 1970s. And one principle, more than almost any other, underpinned everything Mrs Thatcher did: her belief that Britain was in deep national decline.40

  Mrs Thatcher was not, of course, the first party leader to argue that Britain was going backwards. But none of her predecessors, with the possible exception of Joseph Chamberlain, had been so passionate or so apocalyptic. As she saw it, everything began with decline. Her first election broadcast, on 16 April 1979, put it centre stage:

  We can go on as we are. In a way that is the easy option. But we could not do that for long. Year after year we have been falling further behind friends and neighbours. And the British people will not indefinitely tolerate our country becoming the poor relation of Western Europe. If we go on declining, we shall sooner or later fall; and we shall become a quite different kind of country …

  But we needn’t go on as we are. There is nothing inevitable about our continued decline. Britain was once a great country. She still is a great country, though few would have known it from the way we have behaved this winter. Yet our greatness will soon disappear altogether unless we change our ways.

  She sounded the same note at her set-piece rallies, warning audiences that without change, ‘our glories as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books’. And when she talked to the BBC’s Michael Cockerell a week before polling day, her voice almost cracked as she contemplated the nation’s fortunes. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she said earnestly. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains! And look at us now!’41

  Almost all Mrs Thatcher’s allies shared her belief that the nation was in near-terminal crisis. Her future press secretary, Bernard Ingham, formerly a keen Labour activist, said he had ‘had enough of us being laughed at as a country’. Many of her colleagues saw things in even bleaker terms. Britain was charting ‘a unique course’, declared Sir Keith Joseph, ‘as it slides from the affluent Western world towards the threadbare economies of the Communist bloc’. Even in private they were often astonishingly pessimistic. ‘We in the Western world have learned to live for today not tomorrow,’ Sir Geoffrey Howe told Hugo Young. ‘We are heading for a really terrible time unless we can reverse this trend … a kind of Romanian or other East European economy.’ The next election, Nigel Lawson remarked in February 1979, was ‘our last chance to rescue the British economy from the depressing spiral of decline’. Not all of Mrs Thatcher’s admirers were convinced that she could do it. But she was in no doubt. In her memoirs she quoted Pitt the Elder in 1756: ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.’ It was, she admitted, a ‘presumptuous’ comparison. ‘But if I am honest, I must admit that my exhilaration came from a similar inner conviction.’42

  What makes Mrs Thatcher’s invocation of Pitt the Elder so revealing is that she is often thought to have been indifferent to the value of history. All she cared about, her opponents said, was the market. But this is just not true. As Charles Moore’s biography shows, she had an intensely romantic sense of history, which is why she took so much trouble getting pictures of Nelson and Wellington for Number 10. In this respect, she was nothing if not conservative. When the South African writer Laurens van der Post interviewed her at the end of 1982, she took great delight in showing off not only Robert Clive’s Chippendale table, Pitt the Younger’s desk and Churchill’s chair but also a ‘little scientific gallery’ she had built up in the dining room, with pictures and busts of Humphry Davy, Joseph Priestley and Isaac Newton. Warming to the historical theme, van der Post asked if she would have been a Roundhead or a Cavalier. ‘I’d have been a Cavalier, a Royalist,’ she said instantly. As the conversation wore on she became positively lyrical, delivering misty-eyed tributes to Magna Carta, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Wellington and ‘our great early judges – the Blackstones, the Cokes’. Even the British people’s preternatural love of liberty got a look in. ‘If one were to go into a pub at a time of national crisis,’ she said earnestly, ‘possibly the phrase you’d hear on everyone’s lips as they discuss things would be: “We’re a free country.” Everyone takes it for granted – we’re a free country.’43

  She meant every word. At heart, thought her policy chief, John Hoskyns, she was driven by ‘a patriotic impulse and a sense of shame about what had happened to our country’. Nobody who cared only for market values would have chosen ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ as her favourite hymn. No Roundhead revolutionary would have treated the Queen with such exaggerated deference, or been so fond of pomp and pageantry. And what people often miss about Thatcherism is just how much she was inspired by her faith in Britain’s exceptional history and unique destiny. ‘Britain is not just another country; it has never been just another country,’ she told Robin Day. ‘We would not have grown into an Empire if we were just another European country with the size and strength that we were. It was Britain that stood when everyone else surrendered.’

  That last line is very telling. At the outbreak of the Second World War, she had been an impressionable 14-year-old. Even decades later, her voice thickened with emotion whenever she mentioned ‘Winston’. Not even someone with her sense of destiny, however, could have guessed that General Galtieri would grant her a finest hour of her own.44

  So was there anything distinctive about Thatcherism? There was, but it was a question of tone as much as content. When Ferdinand Mount went to see Mrs Thatcher about working in Number 10, he was taken aback by her unapologetic moral earnestness:

  Education is only part of it. What we really have to address are the values of society. This is my real task, to restore standards of conduct and responsibility. Otherwise we shall simply be employing more and more policemen on an increasingly hopeless task. Everyone has to be involved. At one time, women’s magazines played quite a constructive role. Now they’ve just caved in. Personal responsibility is the key. That was what destroyed Greece and Rome – bread and circuses. It has to stop, Ferdy, it has to stop.

  Mount found all this ‘both startling and thrilling’. After years of ‘weary, professional cynicism’, nothing had prepared him for ‘the naked zeal, the direct, unabashed appeal to morality, the sheer seriousness’ of her vision. Not since Gladstone, he thought, had there been a Prime Minister whose politics were so firmly anchored in what she called the ‘real and absolute difference between right and wrong’.45

  With all politicians, there is always a suspicion that they may not mean what they say. But Mrs Thatcher’s moralism was absolutely genuine. The proof lies in the handwritten notes for her conference speeches, before her speechwriters had polished them into something more conventional. The case for ‘economic freedom’, she scribbled in October 1979, was not that it made people richer, but that it was consistent with ‘certain fundamental moral principles of life itself. Each soul [and] person matters. Man is imperfect. He is a responsible being. He has freedom to choose. He has obligations to his fellow men.’ In a foreshadowing of her much-misunderstood remark that there was no such thing as society, she added: ‘Morality is personal. There is no such thing as a collective conscience … To talk of social justice, social responsibility, a new world order may be easy … but it does not absolve each of us from personal responsibility.’46

  Not surprisingly, none of this made the final draft. But two years later, she was at it again. ‘Virtue of a nation is only as great as the virtue of the individuals who compose it,’ she began. ‘Concept of the nation – at the heart of the Old Testament & one which those who wrote the New Testament accepted
. Idea of personal moral responsibility … Can’t rid ourselves of our own responsibilities by handing them over to the community.’ It is almost impossible to imagine Ted Heath or Harold Wilson writing something like this. But her notes show that she relished the chance to set out her moral vision. ‘All the great religions teach us that life is a struggle between good and evil,’ she scribbled. ‘Life without struggle is no life at all. Each human being carries the potentiality of choice between good and bad. That choice must be examined alone, and in the small family unit. A collectivity cannot choose to be good.’ On and on she went, for twelve pages. Her speechwriters cut the lot.47

  Yet the public were left in no doubt about Mrs Thatcher’s moralistic outlook. In her adoption speech at Finchley in 1979, she claimed that Britain’s economic ills were merely a reflection of a wider ‘decline of manners, of morals, of shared beliefs’. Indeed, there was almost no subject that she did not see in religious terms. Inflation, she told a church service in 1981, was a ‘moral issue, not just an economic one’. Even wage restraint was a ‘moral responsibility’. This was just not the kind of thing senior politicians said. Would Heath have claimed that throughout Britain’s history ‘God was the source of our strength’? Would Wilson have told his audience that ‘the teachings of Christ applied to our national as well as our personal life’? Yet Mrs Thatcher insisted that Britain’s decline was rooted in the fact that ‘only a minority acknowledge the authority of God in their lives’. And although her speeches were not always so explicitly Christian, they almost always had a religious dimension. Again and again she reached for the language of the Sunday school. ‘I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil,’ she told one interviewer, ‘and I believe that in the end good will triumph.’48

  Where all this came from is no mystery. As a child, Margaret Roberts had been brought up to say grace before every meal and to go to chapel four times on Sundays. Her father was a lay preacher, whose sermons insisted on the importance of hard work, clean living and individual salvation. And although she later moved away from Methodism to join the Church of England, she always drew inspiration from what she had heard on the hard wooden pews of Grantham. Indeed, it was the hard wooden pews of Grantham that gave Thatcherism its distinctive character. No modern party leader had ever talked so openly about virtue and vice, salvation and responsibility, freedom and servitude. Some of her ministers found this embarrassing, but her admirers found it invigorating. For years they had been listening to left-wing speakers arguing that conservatism was merely a front for selfishness and wickedness. Now the boot was on the other foot. And this surely helps to explain the virulence of her critics’ hatred. They were used to occupying the moral high ground; yet now they were facing somebody who said, entirely sincerely, that they were the agents of wickedness.49

  Yet Thatcherism was more than just political Methodism. Indeed, although Mrs Thatcher relished talking about her faith, she was never more effective than when she took politics out of the chapel and into the home. Whenever she turned to the economy, for example, she instinctively talked in terms of good housekeeping and the family budget. To her critics, this was proof of her fundamental shallowness, but because it came from a working mother it was immensely effective. ‘I too know what it’s like running a house and running a career. I know what it’s like having to live within a budget. I know what it’s like having to cope,’ she told a studio audience in April 1979. And whenever her opponents accused her of ideological extremism, she had the perfect answer. ‘My politics are based not on some economic theory,’ she told the News of the World, ‘but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest-egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.’ Who could disagree with that?50

  The fact that those words appeared in the News of the World is very revealing. Mrs Thatcher was not the first Prime Minister to flirt with populism, but none had ever done it so vigorously. Her critics sneered that she had turned the party of estate owners into the party of estate agents; one historian has written that ‘Thatcherism owed more to the Sun than the Spectator’. But there were millions more Sun readers than Spectator readers, and an awful lot more estate agents than estate owners. As Gordon Reece told her, their goal was to reach the kind of people, especially women, who watched Coronation Street and Top of the Pops, who listened to Jimmy Young and Woman’s Hour. And since this meant reaching across class lines, she talked not of working-class or middle-class people, but of ‘ordinary people’, the ‘quiet majority’ or ‘ordinary working families’. Today these are staples of our political life, but it was Mrs Thatcher who turned them into clichés. Historians have calculated that between 1975 and 1990, she used the phrases ‘ordinary people’ or ‘ordinary working people’ at 175 different events.51

  The idea of ‘ordinariness’ played a central part in the political culture of the 1980s. If nothing else, it was a clever way of appealing, in the same word, to middle-class and working-class voters alike. In Mrs Thatcher’s moral universe, both groups were natural Conservatives. As ordinary people, they were decent, patriotic and respectable: they worked hard, owned their own homes (or wanted to), cherished their families and obeyed the law. As she told a conference of Conservative trade unionists in 1978, there was nothing remarkable about being a Tory. They were simply ‘a party of ordinary, commonsense, hardworking freedom loving people’. Against them, though, was pitted a stuck-up, self-satisfied establishment of socialist politicians, trade union barons, left-wing teachers, militant students and rent-a-mob rabble-rousers. They did not understand good housekeeping. They did not love British history. They did not care about the nation’s moral and economic decline. And they were not, of course, ordinary.52

  It was here that Grantham came in so handy. For Grantham was the quintessence of ordinariness. The Sun even called it ‘the most boring town in Britain’. Not only was it literally in the middle of England, it was Middle England in microcosm. The young Margaret Roberts had been in no hurry to stay: after she left at the age of 18, she spent the rest of her life in the richer and more glamorous South, and never returned for more than a day or two. But once she became Conservative leader, boring old Grantham became very useful. Every time she invoked the grocer’s shop, the grammar school and the Methodist chapel, she reinforced the message that she was, in her own words, a ‘plain straightforward provincial’, just like the voters she was trying to reach. As one of her allies explained a week before the 1979 election, she was ‘Grantham writ large’.

  No wonder, then, that she always insisted that she had learned her ideas in the Grantham grocer’s shop. In her telling, the Lincolnshire market town in the 1930s was Eden before the Fall, a united, contented community where ordinary people worked hard, raised their families and went to church without worrying about inflation or strikes or students or subversives. This was the Britain she wanted to build, Grantham wreathed in glory. And so on the steps of Number 10, at the moment of supreme triumph, she did not forget the obligatory nod to her home town – or to her father, the self-made grocer and Methodist preacher from whom she had got all her ideas. ‘Well, of course, I just owe almost everything to my own father. I really do,’ she said seriously. ‘He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe and they’re just the values on which I’ve fought the election. And it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things which I believe have won the election.’ It was the last thing she said before she stepped through the black door.53

  It would be easy to leave her there, the applause of her admirers ringing round the little street. But even as Mrs Thatcher was speaking, there were boos among the cheers. Despite the efforts of her strategists, she had never been popular. To many observers, including some loyal Conservatives, she was too narrow, too bossy, too strident and too unsympathetic. As Leader of the Opposition she had never c
ome close to challenging Callaghan’s popularity, and the election campaign had actually made things worse. The more people saw of her, the less they liked her. In just a month, Callaghan’s personal lead over her had widened from 7 per cent to almost 20 per cent, and even four out of ten Conservatives thought he would be the better Prime Minister. Of course victory changes everything. But with less than 44 per cent of the vote, she had secured a smaller mandate than Heath in 1970, let alone Wilson in 1966 or Macmillan in 1959. Her aspirational rhetoric had been rewarded with big swings in the South and the Midlands, yet in the industrial North, Scotland and Wales, the Conservatives had made no progress at all. And among the 37 per cent who supported Labour and the 14 per cent who voted Liberal, there were millions who already shuddered at the very sound of her voice.54

  Against this background, a different leader, anxious to win over what the Guardian called the ‘have-nots, the have-littles and the have-problems’, might have hesitated. But although she was a pragmatist, Mrs Thatcher was not one for wavering. She did not care if her policies were unpopular: as she saw it, being unpopular usually showed you were right. ‘Her distinguishing feature’, a senior civil servant told Hugo Young, less than six months into her premiership, was that ‘no other PM of modern times has been more prepared to live with short-term political unpopularity’. To her admirers, this was what set her apart: she had backbone. Ferdinand Mount often wearied of her ‘insistent, harsh concentration’, but thought that she ‘remained heroic, intolerable often, vindictive, even poisonous sometimes, but always heroic’. He conceded that a different Prime Minister might have adopted a kinder tone and a more gradual approach. But ‘there are times’, he wrote, ‘when what is needed is not a beacon but a blowtorch’.55