Now, this point had been made before and made by many. Of course it had. It has its intellectual origins in classical liberalism; among political philosophers it was most famously expressed by Friedrich von Hayek. But it had never before been made by a politician with Thatcher’s skill at conveying this aspect of the case against socialism or by a politician with her dramatic presence and magnetism. Nor had it been made by a politician who was not American and whose message was not therefore inextricably conflated with what many imagined to be the American imperial project. Nor had it been made—most importantly—by a politician with her ability to project something unique onto the world stage: a radiant aura of unswerving moral certainty. Reagan shared her convictions about socialism, of course, and led a vastly more powerful nation. But Reagan’s was a relaxed and genial personality; hers was an intense and wrathful one. He was thus unable to convey something she conveyed in full: a scorn and fury of Old Testament proportions with socialism and the moral corruption it wrought.
How much precisely did she contribute to the world’s disenchantment with socialism? The answer to this question cannot be quantified, but roughly speaking, a lot. In doing so she affected the lives of billions, literally billions, of men and women.
Second, she matters because she is widely perceived to have reversed the terminal decline of Britain. To understand the significance of this claim, it is necessary first to grasp what Britain once was: the rump of the greatest empire in history, the cradle of capitalism (in Max Weber’s phrase), and from roughly 1815 to 1870 the world’s only industrialized power. In 1870, Britain produced nearly a third of the globe’s industrial output. In the words of the historian Eric Hobsbawm,An entire world economy was thus built on, or rather around, Britain, and this country therefore temporarily rose to a position of global influence and power unparalleled by any state of its relative size before or since, and unlikely to be paralleled by any state in the foreseeable future.5
He is, by the way, not celebrating these circumstances; Hobsbawm is the world’s greatest living Marxist historian, an unrepentant communist to this day. But about this he is quite right. Even America’s dominance at the end of the Cold War pales by comparison. At the height of the Pax Britannica, a quarter of the world’s population and land mass were under British rule. Let us not concern ourselves with the debate over whether this is a fact to be celebrated or lamented; important as this question may be, it is immaterial to the argument. The point is that for good or ill, Britain was by far the most powerful and influential nation on the globe. It was the world’s undisputed premier naval power; it controlled the world’s raw materials and markets; it had long been the world’s leading scientific and intellectual power; it was the financial center of the world and the premier merchant carrier; it had invented the Common Law; it had invented modern parliamentary democracy. This list could be extended for pages; suffice to say that for most of the nineteenth century, Britain excelled its fellow nation-states in virtually every category of economic, military, and political endeavor.
Although the process of decline was in evidence by the beginning of the twentieth century, until the close of the Second World War it could fairly be said that if Britain was no longer the greatest power on earth, it was at least a pivotal one. But in 1945, bankrupt, bled white, and exhausted after fighting two world wars, Britain retreated into itself. Undefeated by Hitler, Churchill was defeated in Britain. Clement Attlee, an earnest socialist who promised to reward the nation for its sacrifices by building in Britain a New Jerusalem, won the 1945 general election. His Labour government was by no means one of Bolshevik extremism, but it nonetheless radically changed the character of Britain, nationalizing major industries and public utilities and introducing both the welfare state and the culture to which such a state gives rise. This transformation—known as the postwar consensus—was accepted by Britain’s Conservative Party and remained unchallenged until Thatcher’s ascendancy.
Britain retreated from the world stage. The United States and the Soviet Union now dominated the world. The Empire commenced inexorably to dissolve. In 1956, the humiliation at Suez made it clear that Britain was no longer even a great power, no less a superpower. It is not an accident that British literature of this century is known for such titles as Decline and Fall, not Rise and Shine.
By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded—choose your favorite cliché—as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable, and a living warning to Americans that the wages of imperial sin is death. “Britain,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remarked to President Gerald Ford in 1975, “is a tragedy—it has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing.” It was “a scrounger.” “A disgrace.”6
In the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun once rose and set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labor unrest shut down public services, paralyzing the nation for months on end. At the height of the crisis, Thatcher, as leader of the Opposition, delivered an acrid speech to the House of Commons. Although obviously partisan, it is also accurate in every particular:. . . basic food supplies are being stopped. The Road Haulage Association confirms that picketing is affecting the supplies of essential goods. The Freight Transport Association also reports a new problem—shortage of diesel fuel, particularly in the South-West, because of picketing at the oil terminal at Avonmouth.
British Rail reports quite simply: “There are no trains today.”
The British Transport Docks Board, the nationalized ports sector, says that, on average, traffic at its ports is down 40 percent in and out of Southampton. The rail strike has added to the burden.
The report from the Confederation of British Industry is that many firms are being strangled. There is a shortage of materials. They cannot move their own products. Exports are being lost. It says that secondary picketing, picketing of firms not in dispute, is very heavy all over the country. It is particularly affecting such items as packaging materials and sugar and all vital materials necessary if industry is to keep going. Lay-offs known to the CBI are at least 125,000 already, and there are expected to be 1 million by the end of the week. There are telegrams and telexes from many companies saying that their exports are not being allowed through and that they might lose the orders forever . . .
The strikes today are not the only ones we have experienced recently . . . We have had the bread strike, hospital strikes, strikes at old people’s homes, and strikes in newspapers, broadcasting, airports and car plants . . . nearly half our factories [have] had some form of industrial conflict, stoppages, overtime bans and go-slows in the past two years; and nearly one-third suffered from all-out strikes.
This is the picture in Britain today.7
Britain had recently become the first country in the OECD to supplicate for a loan from the International Monetary Fund.8 This was an almost unimaginable indignity, hinting that Britain was now in the category of nations to which UNICEF donates mosquito nets.
Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses.9 The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.”10
This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.
Sometime in this period—the date is unclear and varies according to the source, but the story is almost certainly true—a gray, timorous functionary delivered a paper on economic policy to a gathering of British Conservatives. Britain, he argued, must take a pragmatic middle path. In the middle of his speech, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Opposition, interrupted. She stood up. She reached into her handbag, extracted a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty, held it up before the audience, then slammed it on the table. “This,” she said, “is what we believe!”
Britain is now the richest country in Europe, and London once again the world’s financial capital. Thatcher is widely perceived to be the reason for this.
I use the word “perceived” for a reason. I do not propose that anyone accept at face value the claim that Thatcher single-handedly reversed Britain’s trajectory. The story of Britain’s economic and geopolitical decline is exceptionally complex; it is not sure that it has been permanently reversed; and even if it has been, it would be, as Chou En-lai said of the French Revolution, too soon to tell. My own view is that the claim is at least partially true, and this is enough to ensure Thatcher’s place in history. But I do not need to prove this beyond all doubt. The widespread perception that it is true is also a critical element of this story. Given the grip Thatcher retains over the world’s collective political imagination, this legend matters because contemporary leaders—including yours—hope to emulate her example and appropriate her prestige.
This point is connected to my first. Without saying so explicitly, Thatcher conveyed through her words and actions a thesis: Britain’s decline was not an inevitable fate, but a punishment. It was not, as many believed, a punishment for the sin of imperialism. It was a punishment for the sin of socialism. Thatcher proposed that in 1945 the good and gifted men and women of Britain had chosen a wicked path. They had ceased to be great because they had ceased to be virtuous. In ridding Britain of socialism, she intimated, she would restore it to virtue. She would make it once again worthy of greatness.
To a Western world preoccupied with guilt, decline and decay, Thatcher’s message has a particularly significant resonance. It is hardly a secret that many of us are still wondering whether capitalism is the right path. It is the only right path, says Thatcher, and the only one men and women of virtue—not greed, but virtue—should take.
Third, she matters because she is a woman. She achieved things that no woman before her had achieved, and she did so in a remarkable fashion, simultaneously exploiting every politically useful aspect of her femininity and turning every conventional expectation of women upside down. In doing so, she refuted several millennia’s worth of assumptions about women, power, and women in power. She is for this reason not only an important figure, but an immensely interesting one, so much so that she has passed into mythological status even before her death. And this point is related to the two before: The myth she created of herself is what enabled her so completely to capture the world’s imagination and present her case to such transformative effect.
No other living politician can claim these achievements, and none enjoys this stature.
This is why the hopefuls are visiting her, even if she is not quite sure who they are.
2
La Pasionaria of Middle-Class Privilege
Let me give you my vision. A man’s right to work as he will. To spend what he earns. To own property. To have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance.
—THATCHER’S FIRST SPEECH
TO THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
CONFERENCE AS PARTY LEADER
To place the rest of this book in context, we must take a biographical detour. Don’t skim this part! You must understand where she came from to understand what she accomplished.
Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, above her father’s grocery shop. If you look at a map of England, Grantham is about a third of the way between London and the Scottish border, slightly to the east of Britain’s midline. Isaac Newton, too, was raised in Grantham, and in between, nothing of note happened there. Grantham was twice voted Britain’s most boring city in national polls. It is known for its production of diesel engines and road rollers. I was on a train that stopped there once. It is a flat, featureless town of red-brick houses, all roughly alike. As the train idled in the station, I wondered for a moment if I should get out to take a closer look. I peered from the rain-streaked window at the dreary expanse of low-slung brick buildings. In the distance lay a food-processing plant. I looked up at the slate-colored sky. I stayed in my seat.
Hers was a lower-middle-class, piously Methodist family of no distinction. During her time in power, rumors circulated persistently that somehow, through some ancestral illegitimate dalliance, nobility had slipped into her bloodline. No evidence for it at all. The rumors themselves are significant, though, for they suggest the depth of Britain’s obsession with breeding and class. Never were there rumors, by contrast, that Bill Clinton’s grandmother had trysted with a Kennedy; no one in America believed it literally impossible for a leader of his stature to have surfaced from an Arkansas trailer park milieu. Americans don’t think that way.
Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a town alderman and for a short time Grantham’s mayor, so she was exposed to politics from her earliest childhood, but he earned his living as a grocer. He was a Wesleyan lay preacher. This is a significant point. Lay preaching was one of the few ways a man of his epoch and class background could acquire ease and fluency as a public speaker. He thereby inherited a famously eloquent oratorical tradition and passed it on to his daughter. Margaret Thatcher’s speaking career began in childhood, on Sundays, when she read from the high pulpit.
Her mother was a dressmaker. Thatcher revered her father and spoke of him often; she almost never spoke of her mother. No one knows why she didn’t, but everyone thinks it significant. It is a clue, it is said, albeit an opaque one, to understanding her ambition and the nature of her interactions with men.
Margaret Roberts spent her youth, according to the legend she later assiduously promoted, carefully weighing flour and counting change in the family shop, learning the housewifely principles of industry and thrift that subsequently informed her economic policy. Clearly this legend is not the whole story; there is no obvious path between measuring flour and championing monetarism. But like many legends it contains elements of truth. Even if her political philosophy clearly emerged from other influences as well, her class background—that frugal, industrious, Methodist upbringing—was crucially important to informing her worldview.
Britain’s aristocracy tends to be educated at public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, which are not public schools in the American sense, but rather exclusive private ones. Margaret Roberts went to the local grammar school, a public school in the American sense. She was an exceptionally hardworking student and self-righteous, even as a child, about her unnatural discipline. At the age of nine, she was congratulated by her school headmistress for her luck in winning a poetry-reading contest. “I wasn’t lucky,” she replied. “I deserved it.”
Through her diligence she earned a place at Somerville College at Oxford University. Oxford’s self-governing colleges, of which there are now thirty-nine, are united in something like a federal system. At that time only a small number of these colleges admitted women; Somerville was an all-women’s college.
By the time I arrived at Oxford, roughly half a century later, all of its colleges admitted women. My college, Balliol, had done so for only a decade, however, and the ratio of men to women at the graduate level was still about five to one. It is commonly assumed that being a woman in this largely male environment must have been a terrible disadvantage for her, and I am sure that at times this was so. She was unable to join the Oxford Union, for example, the debating club that is the traditional first step to a parliamentary career. But from personal experience I can say that for a woman of the right temperament, this environment was a huge advantage. “Largely male” need not mean “male-dominated.” If you were one of only a handful of women among a group of young men who have barely seen a woman before in their lives—sex-segregated schools were and still are common in Britain—it was almost trivially easy to stand out from the crowd, terrify your peers, receive special attention from your tutors, and be the cynosure of any social gathering. It was a clearly observable law that the more bitterly a woman could be heard complaining of the university’s institutional sexism, the more likely it was that she was ugly, hopelessly passive, or not all that bright. If Thatcher subsequently had no patience with feminists—“Some of us were making it before Women’s Lib was even t
hought of,” she once snapped—I would wager it was because she made precisely the same observation.
Politically, she did well for herself at Oxford, becoming president of the university’s Conservative Association. Academically, she did less well; she took a Second Class degree in chemistry. Oxford degrees are classified into Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds; they are awarded based on a student’s performance in a single set of exams at the end of a three- or four-year study period. That she received a Second might be seen as evidence for a claim commonly made about her, to wit, that she was a woman of relatively modest intellectual gifts. On the other hand, when she subsequently decided to become a lawyer, she qualified after only two years of part-time study, all the while working full-time as a research chemist and assiduously seeking election to Parliament and getting pregnant—with twins, no less. She passed the bar exam only weeks after giving birth. However hardworking you are, I doubt you can do that without being quite fast on the draw.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. After graduating from Oxford, she worked in an Essex plastics factory while immersing herself in politics. She ran for a seat in Parliament twice, in 1950 and 1951, both times unsuccessfully. She had not been expected to win. The contested constituency was a Labour safe seat; running an inherently doomed campaign or two is a political rite of passage in Britain. But she gave her opponent an unexpectedly vigorous workout. Her uncommon energy in campaigning was widely remarked.
She was only twenty-three when she made her second attempt. In the same year she became engaged to Denis Thatcher, whom she met while campaigning. He was the heir to a prosperous chemicals business. Here the story of Margaret Roberts, the middle-class girl from a background of no special privilege, comes to an end. She believed in earning money the old-fashioned way, she always averred, and she earned hers in the most old-fashioned way of all: She married it. Her subsequent career might have been possible without her husband’s money, but it wouldn’t have been easier. This marriage was one of her shrewdest political decisions. It appears to have been a genuine love match, too; by all accounts the Thatchers were utterly devoted to each other. As mothers the world around have traditionally reminded their daughters, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.
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