There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  Needless to say, Ingham does not believe the animus to be fair.

  BI: First of all, I don’t think people really understand the viciousness of the Left in this country. Okay, you may say that the Left is infinitely more vicious in France, where they riot at the drop of a hat and all that, but this lot are really nasty.

  CB: What do you think is the source of that viciousness?

  BI: Well, I think, because we are a fairly intemperate lot. The British pride themselves on being a wonderfully even-tempered and decent people, but once they embrace a doctrine, they can become quite, quite extreme. And the Left, they’re a nasty bunch. And they’re a nasty, scheming bunch, too . . . Then there was the affronted self-regard—you remember, do you, the 364 economists who wrote to the Times?

  CB: In 1981, yes—

  BI: Good. Well, they don’t like being proven wrong. And they were proved comprehensively wrong!

  In one sense, Ingham has a point. Awkwardly for the signatories, immediately after the publication of their letter, Britain’s economy entered an uninterrupted eight-year period of growth. Yet it is also true that the industrial base of the economy was not only eroded, as they had predicted, but gutted. The growth rate reflected the expansion of the services sector; the manufacturing sector contracted sharply in those early years and never recovered. The prediction that her policies would threaten social stability was borne out: Britain was taken to the brink of civil war during the miners’ strike. I note what Ingham said not because it is the unalloyed truth, but because it nonetheless contains an important insight about the nature of Thatcherism and the grievances of her critics.

  BI: The British establishment was in the grip of a sort of pale-pink socialism. There are still a lot of them around now who believe, who have this sort of naive, this romantic view of the working classes—from which I come! I mean, I said, to Eric Morley, “What’s he like, Tony Benn?” “Oh!” he said. “The only thing you need to know about Wedgie is that he thinks the sun shines out of the working classes—!” And then he said to me, “And you and I know better, don’t we?” It’s this romantic notion of—I mean, it’s horridly condescending.

  Anthony “Tony” Neil Wedgwood “Wedgie” Benn, a prominent figure on the Left wing of the Labour Party—the man whose proposals Keith Joseph savaged in his Upminster speech—was the grandson of First Baronet Sir John Benn and the son of the secretary of state for India, First Viscount Stansgate. Benn was educated at one of Britain’s top-flight public schools. Ingham grew up in the West Yorkshire Pennines. His father was a cotton-weaver. Although many of Thatcher’s intimates came from the traditional British ruling class, a notable number did not. Some had not even graduated from university. Many came, like Ingham did, from a working-class background, or, like Thatcher herself, from a lower-middle-class background. A surprising number were Jewish, among them Keith Joseph. It was a government, in many respects, of outsiders, and this must be understood to appreciate both its revolutionary character and the hostility it inspired.

  CB: Where does this romantic notion come from? What are the origins of that?

  BI: Oh, I would have thought the origins are in the Fabians, you know, that we must do good. We know how to do good, and we have the money to do good, and we have the security and we will do good. And that inevitably became, and you will be done good to!

  The thought of the Fabians and their quest to do good makes Ingham bulgy-eyed and red-faced; he punctuates this comment with table-pounding, then lapses, winded, into phlegmy coughing, prompting in me the slight concern that he is about to suffer a fit of apoplexy and keel over. The Fabian Society was the precursor to the Labour Party. Founded in 1884 to advance socialism by reform, rather than revolution, it took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator, who proposed to exhaust the Carthaginians through a strategy of harassment and attrition. None of the Fabians’ founding members came from a working-class background, and most came from money and privilege.

  I have remarked that being a woman in a man’s world was not necessarily the disadvantage it is often imagined to be. Nor was being a grocer’s daughter in a world of guilty aristocrats. In the way only a Republican could go to China, Thatcher was able to pursue an anti-socialist agenda precisely because her class background lent her an ideological imprimatur. She and Ingham found each other so sympathetic in part because they shared a thorough revulsion with the condescension of people who wanted to do good to them and people like them, when they felt themselves quite good enough as they were.

  BI: It is an attitude of mind toward ordinary people that they are not capable of leading their lives without direction. And Mrs. Thatcher was essentially saying, “Oh yes they are, let’s set them free.” And of course when they were set free, quite a lot of them didn’t do well—of course they didn’t. But quite a lot of them prospered enormously, and have never looked back since they got their hands on their council houses! . . . But she really challenged notions—well, she challenged notions of class!

  She challenged notions of class. This is an absolutely key component of Thatcherism, and critical to understanding the emotions she inspired and still inspires in Britain.

  BI: So, does that explain British society?

  CB: Well . . . yes and no.

  BI: Well, tell me where you are desperately uninformed. What do you think is missing?

  There is not much that is missing at all, if you are looking for an account of the way Thatcher and her supporters saw themselves and what they told the world.

  There are, of course, other perspectives.

  Sir Bernard escorts me from the Morning Room and back to the streets of London, holding the doors open for me with a courtly flourish. The city is sparkling; the restaurants are full; the sushi carousels are turning; the Chablis is flowing; the boutiques are selling bath salts made of organic lavender and crystallized kelp. “She stopped the rot in the old colonial power,” Sir Bernard offers as his parting thought. “She stopped the country from going to the dogs. And it was not in the best interests of the world that Britain should go to the dogs, because it had so much more to contribute to the world.”

  I say good-bye, and I thank him for his time. I mean it sincerely. Anyone who has not spent a morning with Sir Bernard has missed one of life’s great experiences.

  As I head for the Tube, a man of about thirty passes me, walking purposefully, pecking at a Blackberry while simultaneously barking orders down his cell phone. “Still struggling with the flat refurb . . . yeah, brilliant . . . no, need the car at the airport . . . that’s utter bollocks . . . Hong Kong that weekend, client meeting.” From his accent, I cannot precisely discern his class background, but clearly his parents did not live in a castle or hunt foxes.

  A great many Britons found—and still find—such sights unnecessary, mad, and an odious challenge to the natural order of men.

  3

  “I Hate Communists”

  Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul.

  —MARGARET THATCHER, 1981

  In the mid-1980s, the prime minister was urged by her foreign office, against her better judgment, to receive a notorious Congolese communist at 10 Downing Street. No sooner had the hapless Marxist seated himself in her drawing room than she fixed him with an acid glare. She introduced herself with these words: “I hate communists.”

  Mortified, the translator stammered, then rendered Thatcher’s comments thus: “Prime Minister Thatcher says that she has never been wholly supportive of the ideas of Karl Marx.”25 One trusts that the visitor nonetheless guessed from her expression where he stood.

  Hatred of communism, hatred of Marxism, hatred of socialism—and an unflinching willingness to express that hatred in the clearest imaginable terms—was the core of Thatcherism. It was absolutely sincere. It was absolutely personal. If American Cold Warriors deplored the tyranny imposed by communist regimes overseas—in faraway countries of which, frankly, they knew little if not nothing—Thatche
r was affronted by the effects of Marxist dogma on her own country, an entirely different order of outrage.

  The key theme of the election campaign that brought Thatcher to power in 1979 was the decline and humiliation wreaked upon Britain by socialism. In virtually every strategy document and public pronouncement from this campaign, we see the very deliberate association of socialism with wickedness and decay. “This election,” the 1979 Conservative Manifesto announced,is about the future of Britain—a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands. It is rich, too, in human resources, with professional and managerial skills of the highest caliber, with great industries and firms whose workers can be the equal of any in the world. We are the inheritors of a long tradition of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? . . .

  Our country’s relative decline is not inevitable.

  We in the Conservative Party think we can reverse it, not because we think we have all the answers but because we think we have the one answer that matters most. We want to work with the grain of human nature, helping people to help themselves—and others. This is the way to restore that self-reliance and self-confidence which are the basis of personal responsibility and national success.26

  Socialism, Thatcher emphasized again and again, was against the grain of humanity’s God-given nature. The manifesto bears her signature on the first page; the two Ts in her last name are crossed high above the stem of the letter. Graphologists would say this is the mark of an exceptionally ambitious, self-confident, optimistic person. For once those frauds would be right.

  I bring up her handwriting because we are about to spend an afternoon in the Thatcher archives. Dull? Not at all. This is where we actually see and smell and touch the fossil record of history, the documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET—words that always give me a pleasurable frisson, even if the documents in question are tables of inflation statistics, long-since declassified. This is where we see her handwritten notes on speech drafts and policy memos—mostly illegible, alas, let the graphologists make of that what they will—but some of them perfectly clear. This is where we snoop through the notes and memoranda passed to her by her advisors under cover of that SECRET stamp, the documents that say the things politicians wouldn’t dream of saying in public. This is the good part.

  The Thatcher papers are housed in Churchill College, Cambridge. 27 They are curated by Andrew Riley, a man whose welcoming warmth and enthusiasm for all things Thatcher calls to mind Willy Wonka’s pride in his chocolate factory. I, Andrew Riley, will conduct you around the archives myself, showing you everything that there is to see, and afterwards, when it is time to leave, you will be escorted home by a collection of large CD-ROMs. These CD-ROMs, I can promise you, will be loaded with archival documents to last you and your entire household for many years!

  Andrew whisks me off for several cups of strong coffee, then takes me up the modern stairs and down the modern hall to tour the paper collection. To enter the manuscript room he spins a huge steel dial—something manufactured by a military contractor, I suspect—and puts his whole weight against the heavy, reinforced door. The manuscript room feels like the interior of a spaceship: sterile, climate-controlled, not a mote of dust, unnaturally silent but for the mechanical hum of the air conditioner. Like an accordion, the shelves whoosh apart and re-whoosh shut at the twirl of a Meccano wheel. Hyperactive motion sensors control sliding glass partitions leading to an elevated overpass; they open if you even breathe too close to them, suggesting that they have a will of their own. Andrew shows me the stacks that contain the documents that are yet classified and will remain so for another generation. “Oh, can I just take a peek?” I ask.

  Whoosh-whoosh, the shelves glide shut. “Nope! Not for you.”

  “Oh, come on. I won’t tell anyone. It will be our little secret.”

  “No, no, no! But come on, I have something even better to show you, “ he says cheerfully, ushering me along. I leave the forbidden section, looking reluctantly over my shoulder. The stacks go on for rows and rows; the archive contains over a million documents, 2,500 boxes, 300 meters of shelves, tens of thousands of photographs, a vast collection of press cuttings, audio tapes, video tapes. Andrew shows me what I’m allowed to look at, explains how the catalog system works, then, spinning smartly, beckons me to the back of the room. “Look!” he says, bouncing on his heels with excitement, pointing to a gunmetal-grey box on a raised platform.

  The box appears to be made of something bombproof.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Come closer!”

  I approach. The strange vessel appears to be emitting an aura. Andrew leans over, shielding from my glance the trick he uses to open it. It flips open noiselessly. He stands aside. “Ta-da!”

  There it is: her handbag.

  The thing is almost alive and pulsating. I half expect it to whiz up and begin soaring about the room. Thatcher famously opened a ministerial meeting by thumping that handbag on the table and announcing, “I haven’t much time today, only enough time to explode and have my way.”

  “Smell it,” says Andrew. He is flushed with sly delight.

  “Can I? Really?”

  “Go on.”

  I lean over and sniff, gingerly. There is a faint odor of talcum and lily. I look at him, surprised. “It smells—”

  “My grandmother wore a perfume that smelled just like that.”

  He’s right. The handbag smells like a nice old lady.

  I’m taken aback. I had been expecting it to smell like napalm and gunpowder.

  Now we’ll look at the documents. Have you washed your hands? Stored your belongings in the locker? You must place each paper flat on the table. Only one file at a time. Use a pencil to take notes, absolutely not a pen, and for God’s sake, don’t get the papers out of order.

  Many of the documents are useless and mind-numbingly boring. “Tourism is an important growth industry in Wales,” that sort of thing. We’ll skip those. The good stuff is in the pre-election strategy documents, the documents that show us just what Thatcher and those around her proposed to do and how their minds worked. This one, for example:Britain under Jim Callaghan is far from an ideal society. Yet already the normal rosy hues that proceed [sic] an election are being painted by the Labour Government. Even the IMF are springing to their aid. We must counteract this propaganda. We shall do this by painting what we believe to be the true picture of “Jim’s Britain.” This is a very ugly society and we believe the following words characterize it: selfish, cruel, irresponsible, evil, unjust, unfair, dishonest, secret, frightened, cowardly, lacking nerve, stupid, illogical, dull, unthinking, unreasonable, erratic, simplistic, hostile, hateful, ignorant, confused, poor, hesitant, short-sighted, blind, apathetic, bored, tired, pessimistic, unfulfilled. In other words we have an immature society where individuals deny responsibility to each other. Both they and their country seem to have lost faith in themselves. There is no appearance of personal growth, no fulfillment of satisfaction for self, children or indeed the whole family. No sense of pride, no sense of patriotism.

  Thatcher was particularly gifted at spotting opportunities subliminally and overtly to convey that she was above all a thrifty housewife who did the family shopping, knew how much groceries cost, and understood how deeply rising prices affected the ordinary British family. (Contrast this with the elder George Bush, who was reportedly baffled by the sight of a supermarket scanner.) Her policies, she intimated repeatedly, were nothing more than common-sense household economics writ large. (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)

  We shall contrast Jim’s Britain with the normative model of Britain’s ideal society that Tory values will create. By contrast this society would evidence concern for others, la
w and order, justice, fairness, honesty, integrity, openness, courage, a preparedness to take risks for fair rewards, enterprise, invention, intelligence, thoughtfulness, freedom, good sense, concern, knowledge, underlying convictions, mature restraint, self-confidence, loyalty, responsibility for others, self-respect, pride, vision, vibrancy, patriotism, inspiration and interest. Above all, a willingness to support one’s country, the best for oneself and one’s family. An optimism, a sense of fulfillment, a desire to reach maturity so that one is at peace with oneself and the world, and in a natural state of grace.28

  A natural state of grace. Clear enough?

  This passage comes from the draft of a critical document, the 1977 “Stepping Stones” report, written by the future head of her policy unit, John Hoskyns. “Stepping Stones” was the blueprint for the Thatcher Revolution.

  In 1977, Hoskyns collaborated with Thatcher’s adviser Norman Strauss on a plan for the Tory Party’s communication strategy. Hoskyns sent Thatcher the following memorandum summarizing their recommendations:The objective is to persuade the electorate that they must consciously and finally reject socialism at the next election . . . Before voters will do this they must feel: