UNFORTUNATELY FOR HER PROSPECTS OF BECOMING A NATIONAL, AS DISTINCT FROM A PARTY, LEADER, SHE HAS OVER THE YEARS ACQUIRED A DISTINCTIVELY UPPER MIDDLE CLASS PERSONAL IMAGE. HER IMMACULATE GROOMING, HER IMPERIOUS MANNER, HER CONVENTIONAL AND SOMEWHAT FORCED CHARM, AND ABOVE ALL HER PLUMMY VOICE STAMP HER AS THE QUINTESSENTIAL SUBURBAN MATRON, AND FRIGHTFULLY ENGLISH TO BOOT. NONE OF THIS GOES DOWN WELL WITH THE WORKING CLASS OF ENGLAND (ONE-THIRD OF WHICH USED TO VOTE CONSERVATIVE), TO SAY NOTHING OF ALL CLASSES IN THE CELTIC FRINGES OF THIS ISLAND . . .
Margaret Thatcher’s bustling, proper, middle-class officiousness prompted astonishing effusions of snobbery among Britain’s elites. When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theater producer Jonathan Millar replied that it was “self-evident”—they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle-class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.” (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)
THESE ARE STILL EARLY DAYS THOUGH . . . THE ODDS ARE AGAINST HER, BUT AFTER HER STUNNING ORGANIZATIONAL COUP D’ÉTAT THIS PAST MONTH, FEW ARE PREPARED TO SAY SHE CAN’T DO IT. 20
Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, succeeded by the new leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher immediately began to attract international notice, particularly for her coruscating attack on the Soviet Union, delivered at the Kensington Town Hall: The Russians are bent on world dominance and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense—the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . If we cannot draw the lesson . . . then we are destined, in their words, to end up on the scrap heap of history.21
This speech led the state-controlled Soviet press to give her the name by which she has since been known: the Iron Lady. It tells you something about the way Britain was perceived at the time that the communist apparatchiks who coined this phrase presumably believed this would be understood in Britain as a hurtful insult, one that would damage her prestige, not enhance it. It also suggests how divorced those apparatchiks were from the sentiments of their own citizens, many of whom from then on worshipped her as primitive man worshipped the sun.
Like the rest of the industrialized world, Britain endured throughout the 1970s the reverberating effects of the 1973 oil price shock. Inflation soared, reaching a peak of 27 percent in 1975. If real wages were diminishing, Britain’s labor leaders concluded, this was more than a hardship for the working man, it was an injustice perpetrated against him by the ruling classes. The remedy, they concluded, was workers’ solidarity and the blunt weapon of industrial action. Labor leaders of greater wisdom, or at least ones in possession of a more sophisticated economic model, might have concluded that strikes and work stoppages were the last thing Britain now needed, and indeed the one thing guaranteed to deal a death blow to an already faltering economy. Wisdom was not their forte.
During the Winter of Discontent, the question raised by Heath—Who rules?—hung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be the question, and it was a question to which Britain’s powerful unions had a ready answer: We do. They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.
When the 1979 general election brought the Conservatives back to power, there was no widespread expectation that Thatcher could change this situation, and there has been no attempt retrospectively to suggest that there was. Her election, according to her friends and enemies alike, was not personal: It was a rebuke to the Labour Party and the embarrassing diminishment of Britain over which it had presided.
BI: She won by a contempt, really, for the Labour Party’s inability to cope with the trade unions. But no great expectation that she would be any better at it. They felt she ought to have a chance. I think quite a lot of people thought that she couldn’t do any worse than the men . . .
CB: How would you describe the economic climate, the moral climate in Britain back then?
BI: Let me try to make the point this way. Just as I believe people in this country, the most stupid people in our country, most of whom can be found in our government, do not understand the nature of the trauma that hit the United States with 9/11, so the United States—and people in this country have forgotten—so people in the United States will have no understanding, really, of the dire nature that British society had reached by 1979. It wasn’t quite so bad that people felt that society was breaking down, but it was bad enough for people to wonder whether they would go into work that day, whether they would get into work that day, whether their rubbish would be cleared, where the next strike—railway or whatever—would happen. And it was a poor society. I’ve never been as poor in my adult life as I was in the mid ’70s. Devaluation [of the currency] and all that kind of thing. I felt, even though I was a civil servant, I felt impoverished. Because of the shabbiness. The way Britain had become, it felt totally shabby. In the hands of a many-headed dictator called—
CB: What did “shabby” look like?
BI: It was a fairly primitive society. People living in council houses, under the thumb of local authorities, large areas of working-class houses that had long since seen their best . . . It was shabby.
Britain was shabby, I can testify to this. In fact, I moved to Britain in 1988, at the tail end of the Thatcher era, and it was still shabby. Before this, I had been working in Paris as a fille au pair. The difference between Paris and London—even after nearly ten years of Thatcher—was shocking. Paris was gay, bright, renovated; London was dreary and sullen. Throughout Britain, people looked ragged and worn-down. The food was inedible. Standards of customer service were appalling. Nearly twenty years later, the transformation of Britain is undeniable. London is now pristine and gleaming, packed with superb restaurants, purveyors of flat-screen televisions and organic linens, upscale aromatherapists. There has been a transformation in the appearance of the British people: They look healthier; they have better skin and glossier hair; they are well-dressed. To take the Eurostar from London to Paris is now to have precisely the opposite reaction from the one I had two decades ago. Getting off the train, one notes immediately that by comparison with London, Paris is shabby.
Prior to the 1979 election, the British ambassador to Paris, Nicholas Henderson, sent a dispatch to the Foreign Office. It was leaked several weeks later to the press during the general election campaign and immediately became an iconic document, a detailed and devastating dissection of British shabbiness and all that it entailed.
“I myself,” he wrote,was able to observe Churchill, Attlee and Bevin dealing on equal terms with Stalin and Truman at the Potsdam Conference when no German or Frenchman was present . . . in the mid ’50s we were still the strongest European power, economically and militarily . . . It is our decline since then in relation to our European partners that has been so marked, so that today we are not only no longer a world power, we are not even in the first rank as a European one . . .
Indeed in France we have come nowadays to be associated with malaise as closely as in the old days we were associated with success.22
Contemporary readers of this document will be struck by another remark. “Apologists,” wrote Henderson, “. . . will argue that the British way of life, with ingenuity and application devoted to leisure rather than work, is superior to that elsewhere and in any case what people want.” If that argument sounds familiar, it should: It is what is now said
about France.
There is a point that should be emphasized here. In terms of key economic indicators, Britain was not declining in absolute terms; in fact, the economy had grown at a slow but steady average of 2 to 3 percent per annum since the end of the Second World War. What Ingham and Henderson are lamenting is Britain’s relative decline. Once the world’s foremost power, it had now been outpaced by Germany.
And why? This is a key question. One hypothesis is that the economic policies Britain pursued after the Second World War destroyed Britain’s natural genius for greatness. A second is that Britain simply followed a natural economic pattern: It experienced rapid growth at the onset of industrialization, but slower growth thereafter. If Germany was, in the 1970s, growing faster than Britain, this was because Germany had begun the process of industrialization later than Britain. More to the point, having been leveled in the Second World War, Germany was starting from zero, which severely skews any statistical analysis.
I mention this argument to Sir Bernard, who agrees that yes, Britain’s decline was only a relative decline. But his reply—and again, this may be taken as the official Thatcherite view—was that even this relative decline needn’t have occurred.
BI: The big difference was, after the war, the Germans let rip, and we didn’t. I mean, we had controls, we had—we were a semi-socialist society. Not with the apparatus of the Soviet Union or anything like that, but we were a semi-socialist society with all kinds of restrictions and controls that held back enterprise. Whereas they let it go. Much quicker. I mean, I remember that during the ’50s—Why don’t they have rationing, and why do we? I mean, we won the bloody war!
We won the bloody war. To understand Thatcherism, start with this sentiment. We won the bloody war, and we used to run the world. Now we have rubbish and dead bodies piled on our streets, and compared to German cities, gleaming and rebuilt with Marshall Aid (never mind that the trees in those cities are exactly the same height, one of the most chilling sights in the world, when you consider what it means), we look shabby.
This sense of humiliation was Thatcher’s fuel.
At the age of fifty-three, Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister in the history of Britain. At the age of fifty-four, she became the most unpopular prime minister in the history of Britain. By no standards could her first years in office be termed a success. Zealously embracing the monetarist prescription, her government attempted to control inflation by raising interest rates. To her dismay, inflation rose, and unemployment quickly doubled.
In 1980, at the Conservative Party conference, Thatcher made one of her most famous speeches. This would not be Heath redux. “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase—the U-turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to—”
Dramatic pause.
“The Lady’s not for turning!”23
A punch line perfectly executed. A roaring crowd. The words came from the title of Christopher Fry’s play The Lady’s Not for Burning, and even those who did not understand the reference understood the drama.
Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Britain was now in a severe recession, with unemployment at its highest rate since the Second World War. According to Keynesian orthodoxy, the government should have been stimulating demand, even if this created inflation. Instead, it continued to attempt to curb inflation by controlling the money supply. Thatcher’s chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, unveiled another counter-Keynesian budget, raising taxes. Keynesian economists throughout Britain were aghast; 364 of them sent an open letter to the Times arguing that this policy would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.” Thatcher ignored them. She purged her cabinet of those who agreed with them. In this respect, she had not been kidding; there was no turning.
But on the other critical battlefront, she turned straightaway. Faced with the threat of a miners’ strike and unprepared for it, she capitulated immediately to the National Union of Mineworkers.
BI: You can imagine her, how devastated she was . . . Nothing had been prepared! Now—
CB: She was devastated?
BI: Yeah.
CB: What did she say?
BI: Well, they’d never prepared anything!
CB: Did she say, “I am devastated,” or are you inferring from something she—
BI: No, no, I don’t remember her saying, “I’m devastated,” but I do remember her saying, “No preparations have been made, what on earth is going on?” . . . When I say she was devastated, I think she was mortified, certainly—
CB: Well, it really required years of preparation, how could she have been—
BI: Two years, they’d had two years by then. But what does that tell you? It tells you that there was a palsy of will in the government machine . . . It was like a rabbit in the headlights! They knew trouble was there, but they thought they had to find a way of living with it, rather than beating it.
Ingham is arguing—as he would—that the failure to prepare for this absolutely predictable challenge wasn’t Thatcher’s fault. It was the fault of the “government machine.” But Thatcher was the head of the government, so this is an impossible distinction to sustain. The failure to prepare was Thatcher’s failure and was widely understood to be so.
Thus the achievements of the first years of Thatcherism: Her economic policy was ostensibly a disaster, and far from taming the unions, she had proved herself, as the union leaders claimed, a bitch, to be sure, but their bitch. Had her time in power ended here, she would have been noted by history as a footnote and a minor curiosity.
By 1982, unemployment had reached 3.6 million—a conservative estimate, in both senses of the word, since the government kept finding new ways to define unemployment to make this statistic come out lower. Heath had caved in and reversed his policies when unemployment reached one million. Inflation was beginning slowly to drop, but British manufacturing had shrunk by a quarter. Rioters took to the streets; British cities burned. No one believed Thatcher would survive, and indeed she might not have survived, had she not been blessed by extraordinary luck—as so often she was.
That luck came in two forms: the utter disarray of the Labour Party, riven by factional infighting, and the fecklessness of the leader of the Argentine military junta, Leopoldo Galtieri, who chose this moment to seize the Falkland Islands. Thatcher dispatched a naval task force to recapture them, winning a spectacular military victory. The Labour Party fragmented, its members at each other’s throats. Thatcher won the 1983 general election in a landslide.
It was now that the Thatcher revolution really began. Britain’s economy began not only to recover but to grow. The Tories introduced legislation to curb the power of trade unions and stockpiled coal, preparing to withstand a miners’ strike. The government began selling off nationalized industries and public utilities at a brisk clip, and continued selling state-owned council houses to their tenants, an enormously popular policy.24 With Thatcher’s support, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative and stationed cruise missiles on British soil.
In 1984 came the defining moment of Thatcher’s tenure: the battle for the coal mines. The story of the miners’ strike is so gripping it might be fiction, but it is entirely true. It involves two great personalities: Thatcher herself, and Arthur Scargill, coal miner and communist, one of the most powerful orators in the annals of the Left. It is a story of two ways of looking at the world, and the contest that would determine whether Britain would be a capitalist society or a socialist one.
Previous mining strikes had been over in a matter of weeks. Not this one. Over the course of a year, as all of Britain watched, horrified, waiting to see who would break first, Thatcher proceeded to crush her enemies with a calculating, ruthless violence that stunned the British public. Neither labor nor the unions ever recovered. For a brief moment of clarity, power politics stood revealed in all its stark drama. The unions had made a bid for power. They lost. They
were doomed. No longer was there any doubt what kind of country Britain would be. No longer was there any doubt who ruled.
In late 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain. Thatcher declared him a man she could do business with. One year later, the West did business with him at the Reykjavik summit, and the year following, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. In 1987, Thatcher won a third term in office, becoming the only prime minister in the twentieth century to serve three consecutive terms.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Just as communism’s prehensile grip on power began to loosen, so did Thatcher’s. The introduction of the poll tax—a uniform, fixed charge for community services—was intended to reduce the hold of the Labour Party on local councils by exposing its profligacy, but instead sparked protests and riots. Inflation began again to rise. Her cabinet fractured over the terms of Britain’s entry into Europe.
In 1990, her longest-serving minister, Geoffrey Howe, resigned. Thatcher was challenged for the Conservative Party leadership by her former defense minister, Michael Heseltine, who gained sufficient votes in the first round of balloting to force a second one. Persuaded by her cabinet colleagues that she had lost the support of her party and could not win, she resigned.
She was never defeated at the polls.
Leave aside for the moment the question of credit for the vibrant state of Britain’s economy now—is it the consequence of Thatcher’s policies, or New Labour’s, or both, or neither? We will come back to that. Let us instead ask what seems to me the obvious question to ask of the man who managed Thatcher’s image. Given that the economy is now so vibrant, why is Thatcher still so often reviled in Britain? For if it is often said that the American people would elect her in a heartbeat, this is not so in the country she ran. Thatcher’s name to this day inspires in a remarkable number of her countrymen profound vitriol, even among people who have clearly been the beneficiaries of her policies. What was it about her that so rubbed people the wrong way?
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