Thirty years ago, on June 9, Margaret Thatcher won her greatest electoral victory. Pollsters declared it had been to date the easiest election to predict. The divided opposition was routed, which included the Tory grandees inside her Cabinet who, up to two years earlier, were manoeuvring to unseat her. In the new Cabinet, many of them were out or demoted.
It is probably Margaret Thatcher that has shaped our idea of what Elizabeth I must have been like
Despite that so much was said in the wake of her death earlier this year, Thatcher’s moment of apotheosis deserves revisiting.
In the first instance, Europe’s current state of woe – the economic crisis, governments ready to stomach huge rates of unemployment while administering severe austerity, rising Euro-scepticism – are often said to be part of her legacy. She’s said to have started it all.
But there’s also the personal fascination. Not so much her divisiveness: singular leaders often are. For the people who hated her, as much as her admirers, and around the world (the sobriquet Iron Lady was given to her by Soviet propaganda) she became an icon in a way that other leaders, even if they had similar electoral victories under their belt, never did.
The two issues are worth revisiting because of two biographies (both with the same name, Not For Turning) that have been published since she died.
Charles Moore’s first volume of the authorised biography (Allen Lane) takes us up to the Falklands victory celebrations. Given his access to all her private papers and letters, it is full of scoops of fact.
The single volume by Robin Harris (Bantam), a speech writer, adviser and one of the drafting team of her memoirs, is by an unapologetic though occasionally critical admirer. While also revealing a few telling details (such as that she was a maddening but deeply satisfying person to write for, given her literalness and willingness to spend a long time arguing about individual phrases, such as whether the Iron Curtain should be said to rise or fall), it is essentially an interpretive biography, concerned with giving a shape to her character and Premiership. It is full of scoops of interpretation.
Moore’s volume ends with a seasoned diplomat describing her Falklands victory speech at a dinner at No. 10. “She spoke like Queen Elizabeth I. She looked like Queen Elizabeth I.” The truth is that it is probably Thatcher that has shaped our idea of what Elizabeth I must have been like.
It is difficult to watch Cate Blanchett’s interpretation of the young Elizabeth (in Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film) and not think that it must have been influenced by Thatcher’s own transformation as she rose to real power: the deepening of the voice, the increasingly stylised hair and clothes, and, once her reputation was cemented by military victory, the ruthless clearing out of the inner circle that was never quite trusted.
Elizabeth’s singularity could always be attributed to her royalty. Thatcher, however, proved a paradox, highlighted by Harris. For someone who made so much of her Midlands roots, on the fact that her policies were based on English common sense and patriotism, the opinion polls regularly showed up something odd: she was admired for many things but always found by a majority not to be quite in touch. (Indeed, what the British electoral system disguised was that she secured fewer votes with each passing election. Even in 1983, she obtained 700,000 votes less than in 1979.)
Between them, Moore and Harris help clarify the puzzle. Moore shows the clear lines of continuity between the young Margaret, in her many letters to her sister Muriel (to whom she passed on a boyfriend who became Muriel’s husband), writing about trying to make ends meet at Oxford and elsewhere, her dresses and hats, and her first cool assessment of Denis. It’s the same woman who took a TV crew through her wardrobe, pointing with satisfaction to a black dress that saw her through the Falklands war.
Harris, in arguing that what brought her down was not hubris (the thesis of Hugo Young, in his magisterial interpretive biography written from a liberal’s perspective) but naivety. He argues that, while secretive and distrusting of colleagues, who she felt didn’t share her agenda, she always remained essentially naive in human relationships.
She was a hard worker, burying herself in detail, but not a long-term planner. Harris believes that it was only the 1981 reshuffle that did what it had to do. Other reshuffles ignored the need to have enough supporters on board and, by 1987, her Cabinet adversaries were once again in the majority.
As for the claim that our times are a legacy of hers, both volumes suggest that we are letting ourselves off the hook a bit too easily by blaming all things on her. Privatisation was at first her signature policy and she did pummel the unions (including by bolstering police pay and numbers) but by that time even the UK Social Democrats were in favour of undercutting union power. She was prepared to countenance high rates of unemployment in order to bring down inflation and interest rates.
But tax cuts for the well off, in themselves, were not the first priority, nor were other policies that have contributed to the misery of our times. For that, we need to look elsewhere and blame our own choices.
ranierfsadni@europe.com