The Iron Lady

Did she recall that she had once been a strong upholder of international law who had criticised unilateral American action in Grenada, warned Reagan against retaliation against Libya and opposed carrying the Gulf war all the way to Baghdad without UN authority? Or that she had long argued that nuclear weapons helped preserve the peace and practically defined a country’s sovereignty? Now, faced with the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, she wrote that she ‘certainly would not rule out pre-emptive strikes to destroy a rogue state’s capabilities’⁶³ – while at the same time she dismissed ‘pointless protests about India’s or Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities’.⁶⁴ Now it all depended on whether it was America’s friends or enemies who had the weapons.

Other chapters dealt with Europe’s feeble response to the disintegration of Yugoslavia; her high hopes of China, Hong Kong, India and Asia generally; rather more cautious optimism about Russia; and a somewhat muted restatement of her belief that Israel must eventually be persuaded to trade ‘land for peace’ to secure a just settlement in the Middle East. Most controversial, however, was her latest and definitive blast against the European Union, in which she finally laid bare the gut conviction which had underlain her attitude to the Continent all her life. ‘During my lifetime’, she declared, ‘most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it.’⁶⁵ Of course she was thinking primarily, as always, of the Second World War. But it applied also to the Cold War: Communism was the problem, America the solution.

The European Community, she had concluded, was ‘fundamentally unreformable’. It was ‘an empire in the making… the ultimate bureaucracy’, founded on ‘humbug’; inherently protectionist, intrinsically corrupt, essentially undemocratic and dedicated to the destruction of nation-states. ‘It is in fact a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure.’⁶⁶ That being so, she called for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s membership and, if that failed – as it was bound to do – for Britain to be ready to withdraw and join the North American Free Trade Area instead, turning its back on the whole disastrous folly into which Ted Heath had led the country in 1973.

This sensational demarche was serialised in The Times, starting on 18 March. This time the consensus was clear, right across the political spectrum, that she had finally lost touch with reality. Several of her most loyal supporters, including leading Eurosceptics like Michael Howard, were quick to distance themselves. A poll of constituency party chairmen found 71 per cent rejecting Lady Thatcher’s view. ‘I love her to death,’ the chairman of North East Hampshire Conservatives told The Times, ‘but she’s gone too far. We do not tolerate extremists and she has gone into the extremist bracket.’ ‘She has a special place in Conservative Party history,’ echoed another. ‘What she did for this country was something we should be proud of. But times have moved on… She should gracefully take a step back and let those in charge get on with it.’⁶⁷

The very next day she caught the press off guard by doing exactly that. Having dominated the media all week with her views, she announced on Friday that she had been advised by her doctors to cancel all her scheduled speaking engagements and accept no more. ‘SILENCED’ ran the headlines from the Daily Mail to the Sun. The weekend papers were filled with retrospectives of her career, picture spreads, memorable sayings and virtual obituaries which proclaimed that this was the end of the story. Some commentators doubted if she would really be able to contain herself, since ‘the sound of silence and Lady Thatcher are not natural allies’.⁶⁸ No one pointed out that she had only forsworn public speaking, and that she had sparked the latest uproar without uttering a word. Nevertheless, there was universal agreement that it was the end of an era.

Her three strokes, rather than memory loss, were given as the reason, though clearly the two were connected. She did in fact continue to make public appearances. In October 2002 she attended the opening of the new Archives Centre, built to house her papers at Churchill College, Cambridge, to which the Thatcher Foundation had contributed ?5 million. And she continued to issue brief statements on current events – praising Blair’s ‘bold and effective’ leadership in the war on Iraq, for instance, but at the same time accusing New Labour of ‘reverting to Old Labour with its irresponsible policies of tax and spend’.⁶⁹ She could not quite give up the habit of a lifetime. But essentially she had now finally retired.

In 2003 Denis died, which added further to her confusion. For more than half a century he had been her rock and without him she was lost. It was now generally known that she was suffering – like Ronald Reagan – from Alzheimer’s disease, and she slipped progressively from public view, cared for by a loyal bodyguard of old friends and devoted staff. In 2008 Carol published another book in which she spelled out – rather unnecessarily in many eyes – the extent of her mother’s dementia. Even in her twilight state, however, her capacity to arouse controversy remained undimmed. On becoming Prime Minister in July 2007, Gordon Brown followed Tony Blair’s example ten years earlier by inviting LadyThatcher to tea in Downing Street. She was said to be pleased to be asked back to her old domain and posed happily for pictures on the doorstep; but both Labour and Tory supporters were outraged by Brown trying to exploit her reputation for his own political ends. Paradoxically, even as Brown embraced her, David Cameron was still trying to distance the Tories from her legacy. (‘There is such a thing as society’, he insisted. ‘It’s just not the same thing as the state.’) ⁷⁰ When her statue was erected in the lobby of the House of Commons in 2002 a protester decapitated it with an iron bar; then in 2008 it leaked out that plans were in hand to give her a state funeral – an honour last accorded to Churchill in 1965. It was as if she was no longer a living person but had already passed into history, a semi-mythical icon whose mantle was simultaneously claimed and rejected by both parties.

The debate will be joined in earnest when she finally joins the pantheon of departed leaders. Margaret Thatcher was not merely the first woman and the longest-serving Prime Minister of modern times, but the most admired, most hated, most idolised and most vilified public figure of the second half of the twentieth century. To some she was the saviour of her country who ‘put the Great back into Great Britain’ after decades of decline;⁷¹ the dauntless warrior who curbed the unions, routed the wets, reconquered the Falklands, rolled back the state and created a vigorous enterprise economy which twenty years later was still outperforming the more regulated economies of the Continent. To others, she was a narrow ideologue whose hard-faced policies legitimised greed, deliberately increased inequality by favouring the middle class at the expense of an excluded underclass, starved the public services, wrecked the universities, prostituted public broadcasting and destroyed the nation’s sense of solidarity and civic pride. There is no reconciling these views: yet both are true.

A third view would argue that she achieved much less than she and her admirers claim: that for all her boasts on one side, and the howls of ‘Tory cuts’ on the other, she actually failed to curb public spending significantly, failed to prune or privatise the welfare state, failed to change most of the British people’s fundamental attitudes, but rather extended Whitehall’s detailed control of many areas of national life, shrank freedom where she claimed to be enhancing it, downgraded Parliament and pioneered a style of presidential government which was developed still further by Tony Blair. Nor did she raise Britain’s influence in the world. On the contrary, by binding the country more firmly than ever to the United States and refusing to engage constructively with Britain’s opportunity in Europe, she repeated the historic error which kept Britain outside the European Union in its formative phase, perpetuating its ambivalent semi-isolation. This may prove in the long run her most damaging legacy.

There remains the question of how far Margaret Thatcher, as an individual, inspired and drove the policies that bore her name, or to what extent she simply rode a global wave of anti-collectivism and technological revolution which would have changed British society in most of the same ways, whoever had been in power. What she undeniably did was to articulate the new materialistic individualism with a clarity and moral fervour which appeared to win the argument by sheer force of personality, even when the reality was less radical than the rhetoric. She was not a creative or consistent thinker. There were huge contradictions between her belief in free markets and liberal economics, on the one hand, and her flagrant partiality to her own class and her increasingly strident English nationalism on the other. But that was not the point. She was a brilliantly combative, opportunist politician who, by a mixture of hard work, stamina, self-belief and uncanny instinct, bullied an awestruck country into doing things her way for more than a decade. Above all she was a tremendous performer, who raised genuine passions on both sides of the political divide which have been sadly absent in the bland, spin-doctored days since her departure. She may have achieved less than she claimed, but she still accomplished much that was necessary and overdue. Today the whole culture of incomes policies, subsidies and social contracts – and the