personal criticism, but made it clear that she thought the Major Government had squandered her legacy and pursued the wrong policies in almost every area. At public meetings to promote the book she was still more outspoken. But by now she was simply ranting. Prejudice had finally taken over from politics, unmediated by the memory of responsibility. She was suddenly an opinionated and easily provoked old lady: press a button and she would respond with a tirade until she ran out of steam and had to be prompted with another question, which set her off again. Unfortunately for Major, she still made headlines and her words, as she set off on another whistle- stop signing tour around the country, gave encouragement to those in the party who were working for a change of leader.
Major accepted the challenge and got his response in first. On 22 June he startled the political world by resigning – as Tory leader, not as Prime Minister – and inviting his critics to ‘put up or shut up’: either put up a candidate to defeat him or else stop sniping. The obvious candidate, long seen as Lady Thatcher’s favourite – though she had never publicly endorsed him – was Michael Portillo. But Portillo decided, after some contrary signals, not to stand, and the much less charismatic John Redwood came forward instead. In this crisis of his premiership one might have expected LadyThatcher, who had been so affronted by the constitutional impropriety of a serving Prime Minister being driven from office by a party revolt, to have rallied to her successor’s support, whatever her reservations about him. In fact she remained studiedly neutral. She was promoting her book in America at the time of the ballot on 4 July, but issued a curt statement saying merely that Major and Redwood were ‘both good Conservatives’.41 This was very pointedly not an endorsement. She did bring herself to congratulate Major, however, when he won just enough votes to secure his position – 218 to Redwood’s 89 – and told Wyatt that she would henceforth support Major ‘because the alternative is even worse’. Tony Blair might be a new sort of Labour leader, she conceded but his party was as socialist as ever – though now pursuing its goal through European federalism – so it was vital for the Tories to win again.
She saw a hopeful model for a Tory recovery in the Republicans’ sweeping gains in the 1994 mid-term congressional elections in America, under the born-again leadership of Newt Gingrich. ‘After an unhappy period when the momentum stalled,’ she declared in Washington, the Republicans ‘have now decided to regard the 1980s as a springboard, not an embarrassment. And the political dividend has been huge. I hope that British Conservatives will raise their sights and learn lessons from America.’42 By the same token she saw the Democratic President Bill Clinton as ‘nothing but a draft dodger and a coward’,43 as well as hopelessly woolly. ‘He’s a great communicator,’ she acknowledged. ‘The trouble is he has absolutely nothing to communicate.’44
She was on more solid ground when she kept to the world stage. In March 1996 she made one of her most prescient speeches when invited to speak at Fulton, Missouri, where, fifty years earlier, Churchill had coined his great image of an ‘iron curtain’ descending across Europe. With the help of her speechwriter, the now indispensable Robin Harris, she rose to the occasion with a Churchillian survey of the world after the end of the Cold War, highlighting the rise of ‘rogue states’ – was she the first to use the phrase? – ‘like Syria, Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya’ and the danger from ‘the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’. The world, she warned, ‘remains a very dangerous place… menaced by more unstable and complex threats than a decade ago’. But she feared that with the risk of imminent nuclear annihilation apparently removed, ‘we in the West have lapsed into alarming complacency about the risks that remain’. Her preference was explicitly for pre-emptive military action to remove the threat – a policy that would have to wait for the presidency of the younger George Bush, acting under the provocation of the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. In the meantime she merely urged the West to press on with the development of ‘effective ballistic missile defence which would protect us and our armed forces, reduce or even nullify the rogue state’s arsenal and enable us to retaliate’. She called for a reinvigoration of NATO both by extending its membership to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and by allowing it to operate ‘out of area’ to defend the West’s security. But as always she saw all progress and safety in terms of American leadership, with Britain as America’s first ally. ‘It is the West – above all perhaps the English-speaking peoples of the West… which we all know offers the best hope of global peace and prosperity. In order to uphold these things, the Atlantic political relationship must be constantly nurtured and renewed.’45
With the 1997 General Election only months away and a Labour victory seemingly almost certain, she did not want to be seen to rock the boat. For some time she had been telling friends that the country had ‘nothing to fear’ from Tony Blair, a patriot who, she said, ‘will not let Britain down’.46[q] But now an unnamed ‘ally’ told
Once again she was determined not to be sidelined when the election came. No sooner had Major announced the date than she was on the pavement outside Chesham Place giving an impromptu press conference, as she had so often done in Downing Street, to try to quash reports that she was secretly supporting Blair. ‘The phrase “New Labour” is cunningly designed to conceal a lot of old socialism’, she warned. ‘Don’t be taken in… Stay with us and with John Major until we cross the finishing line.’48 She appeared with Major twice during the campaign, and made a number of barn-storming forays on her own to selected constituencies without rocking the boat too vigorously.
Eighteen years of Conservative Government ended on 1 May 1997 in an even bigger Labour landslide than the polls had predicted. Labour won 419 seats and the Liberal Democrats – benefiting from widespread tactical voting – 46, reducing the Tories to a rump of 165 (their worst result since 1906) and giving Blair a majority of 179, which dwarfed even Mrs Thatcher’s two big wins in 1983 and 1987. Lady Thatcher viewed this debacle with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was a lifelong party warrior and believed enough of her dire warnings about resurgent socialism to deplore the state to which her old party had been reduced. On the other hand, she could not disguise a certain satisfaction in contemplating the shipwreck which she believed her successors had brought upon themselves by discarding her in 1990. She did not consider the alternative view that she had left Major a poisoned legacy – an economy running into recession, declining public services and a party already deeply split over Europe – and had done everything in her power over the past seven years to undermine his authority and widen the rift. Many commentators saw 1997 as the electorate’s delayed verdict onThatcherism.All but the most committed partisans thought a change of government overdue and healthy.
At a deeper level, however, 1997 can be seen as Mrs Thatcher’s greatest victory, which set the seal on her transformation of British politics. She had set out, on becoming leader in 1975, to abolish socialism and twenty years later she had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. By her repeated electoral success, by her neutering of the trade unions, by the privatisation of most of the public sector and the introduction of market forces into almost every area of national life, she – and her successor – had not only reversed the tide of increasing collectivism which had flowed from 1945 to 1979, but had rewritten the whole agenda of politics, forcing the Labour party gradually and reluctantly to accept practically the entire Thatcherite programme – at least the means, if not in its heart the ends – in order to make itself electable. Blair was a perfectly post-Thatcherite politician: an ambitious pragmatist with a smile of dazzling sincerity, but no convictions beyond a desire to rid Labour of its outdated ideological baggage. The rebranding of the party as ‘New Labour’ was the final acknowledgement of Mrs Thatcher’s victory. ‘We are all Thatcherites now,’ Peter Mandelson acknowledged.49 She had not only banished socialism, in any serious meaning of the word, from political debate, but she had effectively abolished the old Labour party. ‘New’ Labour was as dedicated as the Tories to wealth creation and market forces, even if it hoped – as Major, too, had done – to pursue them with more humanity than Mrs Thatcher had often shown. Back in the polarised 1970s the dream of most pundits had been that Britain should become more like America, with two capitalist parties differing in style and tone but agreed on essentials, like the Republicans and Democrats. The rise of New Labour had now brought this to pass. But instead of an alternation of parties, the consequence was almost fatal to the Tory party.
Three weeks after the election, just before attending his first European summit, Blair outraged old Labour stalwarts by inviting Lady Thatcher to Downing Street. ‘She has a mind well worth picking,’ his spokesman explained, ‘and he wants to see her again.’50 She was happy to give him the benefit of her advice. Blair, with his huge majority, his personal self-confidence and vaguely messianic leanings, was – as William Rees-Mogg wrote in
