If, in November 1935, one had told British voters, as they headed to vote in what would be the last general election before war broke out, that in five years their wartime leader would be Winston Churchill and that they would remember him as the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century, they would have been incredulous. One would have had a better chance of selling them the Tower of London.
Up until she became Prime Minister, in 1979, she was mocked as lacking in true leadership qualities
Churchill was already over 60, known to like his drink and had changed his political party not once but twice, first dumping the Conservatives for the Liberals and later rejoining them. Only 20 years before the 1935 election, during the Great War, he had been one of those blamed for the military disaster at Gallipoli and the Dardanelles. His Cabinet demotion from First Lord of the Admiralty was a precondition for the Conservatives to join the Liberal Government in a coalition.
And, yet, only a generation later – one year less than the distance between 1987 and 2013 – a chain of events, in which chance played an important role, saw him become, first, a war leader and, next, the man whose rhetoric captured and built the spirit of a nation.
Churchill was one of those leaders whose personality had an undeniable decisive imprint on the circumstances around him. Yet, it is also undeniable that only the most obtuse mythmaker would deny that the main source of his great political charisma lay in his circumstances. The British lion was as much a creature of power as a dormouse.
The same can be said for the British Prime Minister widely considered to have been second only to Churchill in the pantheon of 20th-century political greatness. As the eulogies flow, and the political divisions Margaret Thatcher inspired are re-awakened, it is worth resisting the mythmakers to recall the role of chance in her career and of circumstance in her charisma.
Up until she became Prime Minister, in 1979, she was repeatedly mocked as lacking in true leadership qualities. Roy Hattersley, a member of the outgoing Labour Cabinet, recalls a very senior civil servant nonchalantly saying that he expected Labour to be back in four years. (It ended up spending 18 years in Opposition).
Throughout Thatcher’s previous four years as Opposition Leader, the Labour Government, despite a very fragile grip on Parliament, patronised her during debates, always treating her as the unremarkable politician she had been when serving under other Conservative leaders. Indeed, it is still considered plausible that James Callaghan might have won had he gone for an election in the autumn of 1978, rather than in the spring of 1979.
She became Conservative leader to her own party’s surprise. Until a few years earlier, her highest ambition was to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The leadership race was not an ideological contest and she did not win as a candidate of the right. She owed a lot to her campaign manager, Airey Neave, famous for escaping from Colditz and organising other Allied escapes (and later murdered by the IRA).
Neave was determined that the leader, Edward Heath, had to go after two lost elections. He offered to organise Thatcher’s campaign only after other potential leaders, one of them Willie Whitelaw, a man close to Heath in political outlook, turned him down. The Conservative establishment expected Thatcher to be their stalking horse: the person to bring down Heath in the first round, only to be defeated in the second. She routed them all because they didn’t agree on a single candidate and because their reluctance to challenge Heath directly marked them as ditherers.
It is part of the Thatcher myth that she never compromised, not even with her party. That is truer – at least in party terms – of her predecessor, Heath, who was even more abrasive than she was.
Thatcher learned the lesson well: she paid attention to her backbenchers and threw them some red meat (like on immigration policy) when she thought them hungry. It was only a decade later that she forgot the lesson and then she was thrown out by her own parliamentarians.
It is true, of course, that her political legacy will rest on those key instances where she refused to compromise, particularly on labour laws and on the Falklands, where her nerve held out while the men around her hesitated. The old joke is that she was the only man in her Cabinet. Actually, the fact that she was a woman, of her social background, may have had everything to do with it.
The politicians who saw the recklessness, not just the undoubted courage, of going to war with Argentina, had seen war for themselves. She would have been old enough to serve in WWII but, as a woman, of course, she didn’t.
Furthermore, born in 1926, of a self-employed father, she did not experience the nadir of the Great Depression but only its tail end – unlike the Prime Ministers who immediately preceded her: Harold Wilson, Heath and Callaghan, for whom the threat of unemployment had hung like a sword over their fathers and family stability. These were the men who had given in to striking workers over the previous decade, having started out determined to implement reforms.
If we underestimate the role of luck and circumstance in shaping the persona of leaders like Thatcher, we run the risk of misunderstanding our own times, too.
ranierfsadni@europe.com