Letter from the UK (About Margaret Thatcher)

Margaret Thatcher: A champion of freedom for workers, nations and the world

Charles Moore, Baroness Thatcher's authorised biographer, analyses her personal strengths – and her weaknesses.

The Telegraph 
Charles Moore

9:34PM BST 08 Apr 2013

Margaret Thatcher loved her country. Like Charles de Gaulle in France, she had a certain idea of it. This idea was forged by a God-fearing, hard-working provincial childhood and by the Second World War. She believed in our strenuous virtues. The British, to her, were brave and free and unique. When, during the Falklands crisis, she suddenly found war leadership thrust upon her, she quoted Shakespeare: ''Nought shall make us rue if England to itself do rest but true.’’ She wanted Britain – and especially England – to be true to itself.

After the Conservative government of Edward Heath lost the general election of February 1974, Mrs Thatcher realised, quite suddenly, that her nation was failing. At home, trade union power, over-government, over-borrowing, high taxes, inflation, were destroying it. On the international scene, Soviet Communism was threatening the future of freedom in the West. Until that time, she had believed, almost deferentially, that the men in charge could put things right. Now she saw that they hadn’t, and couldn’t. She began to think that perhaps a woman could.

Her strong personal ambition and her strong patriotism came together.
When her great friend Keith Joseph, Heath’s most prominent critic, decided that he was temperamentally unsuited to the leadership, the way lay clear for her. She challenged Heath, and, in February 1975, she beat him. The party supposed to be the most traditionalist in the world had picked the most radical democratic leader of the post-war era.

Although highly conservative – almost nostalgic – about Britain and its former empire, Mrs Thatcher looked forward. She believed there was little the British people could not do if only government would let them. Thus she was strongly against the compulsory wage control which was the fashion of the age. She wanted people to get richer, but by work, not by trade union muscle. ''We back the workers, not the shirkers,’’ she said. With the rhetoric of the housewife, she turned economics from the dry terrain of technicians into the stuff of daily life and the subject of political combat.

She also knew the value of enemies. It was the Soviet Union who bestowed on her the title of ''the Iron Lady’’ in 1976, after she had attacked the orthodoxy of detente which was then weakening the defences of the West. The Soviets meant it in mockery, but she could see it was a badge of honour, and she grabbed it. Whether her opponents were the Soviets, or General Galtieri of Argentina, or the IRA, or Colonel Gaddafi, or Arthur Scargill, she rejoiced in her foes. In general, it could be said that she was the only British Conservative leader since the war who beat the Left again and again. That is why many of them hated her, but also why many of them looked on her with a sort of tortured respect.

It is said, and there is truth in it, that Mrs Thatcher was a divisive figure. But it is important to remember that the reason she won her first general election in 1979 was that the country had been deeply divided by the “Winter of Discontent”. Far from being the apostle of selfishness, Mrs Thatcher led the public disgust with the organised selfishness of the union bosses. Her strongest appeal was not to true-blue voters, but to upper-working-class people disillusioned with Labour. It was clear that the ''Social Contract’’ and other devices to deal with organised labour had failed. Her talk of proper rewards for hard work, her offer of discounts for people who wanted to buy their council houses, her promise of government that could actually govern, these offered hope.

After she had won, the forces of despair quickly mustered once more against her. Many of them (the ''Wets’’) were in the higher echelons of her own party. For her first two and a half years in office, they believed that what they saw as her ghastly experiment would fail. She would be forced to reflate, do deals with the unions, bring back incomes policy and return to ''consensus’’. The riots of 1981 seemed to prove them right. 

It was only in the course of 1982, when the economic statistics slowly began to turn right, and she won the Falklands war, that people began to recognise that things really had changed. Markets looked up, the Labour Party split. She won the 1983 election with an overall majority of 144 and had a freer hand to develop policies in which she believed.

In the first term Mrs Thatcher had felt able only to nibble at the edges of privatisation. Now she could get to work with most of the main industries. By the time she left office, she had sold off telephones, gas, BP, freight, airlines, and dozens more (but not, on which she was cautious, railways and the Royal Mail). The idea became Britain’s biggest policy export, deployed all over the world. As with so many of her ideas, it has had its difficulties, but no nation has wanted to go back on it.

In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, she and Ronald Reagan, to put it very simply, won. Once she had succeeded, despite large demonstrations, in installing cruise missiles in Europe, and resisting Soviet expansionism, she felt ready to let her iron bend a bit. Hence the relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, which began in 1984, when he was only agriculture minister. She was the first to see his full potential, and the first to convince Reagan that business could be done with him. She saw this not by leaning to Soviet views, but by frankly arguing with them. She constantly met Soviet and eastern bloc dissidents and loudly supported them, even as she engaged with the totalitarian regime. She and Gorbachev had wonderful set-tos. He accused her party of being out of date by supporting only the ''haves’’. ''I don’t want to create a class of haves,’’ she replied, ''but a nation of haves’’: it was his party that was out of date. This was the sense in which her doctrine of economic liberty was dynamic: it set out to include as many as possible.

Even when she appeared to be sticking up for the indefensible status quo, something different was going on. Her fierce opposition to sanctions against white South Africa was based on the idea that they would keep on hitting the wrong people – the oppressed blacks – and bring about revolution. As a result, Britain was the country most successful in persuading the apartheid government to move. Mrs Thatcher had much more to do with the eventual release of Nelson Mandela than most of those more obviously on his side. He came to No 10 and thanked her.

It was partly because of her sense that freedom was on the offensive ''for the first time in my lifetime’’ that she became increasingly disillusioned with what was then the European Community. In her famous Bruges speech in 1988, she contrasted the gradual opening-up in the east with the spreading frontiers of the European superstate. In her opposition to this, she isolated herself from most of her partners, and paid a price. But as we look at the travails of the euro, a quarter of a century later, it is hard to argue that she was wrong.

 The spirit of the West which flourished so vigorously under her and Reagan now burns low as the eurozone stutters. Even her predictions about the growing power of Germany, in which she tended to discredit herself by her anti-German tone, are proving true.

What did she get wrong? Like all great leaders, many things. Because so much was attempted, a good deal failed. The poll tax, based on the good idea that taxation and representation should be most closely linked, was introduced with a crass disregard for people’s feelings. The national curriculum, introduced to raise lamentable school standards, later became a template for more bureaucracy and central control. Her reforms of the City of London, though essential to allow Britain to compete in the world, opened the way to some of the excesses which beset us in the 21st century. And borrowing which, in personal terms, she hated, became a way of life for too many.

The same two-edged point applies to her extraordinary character. Her courage, eloquence, energy and passion were all huge virtues – as was her less noticed political cunning. But they had a flipside. She was hard for Cabinet colleagues to work with and often unnecessarily combative. Being a woman, she was impatient with their clubby male complacency – another virtue, but one which contributed to her downfall. In later years, her light shone so bright that it became intolerable for those in its shade. She never knew when to stop.

Of all the criticism thrown at Margaret Thatcher, the most famous is the least justified. She did not believe there is ''no such thing as society’’, though she did use those very words. She meant that ''society’’ is made up of individuals and their families who all have responsibilities. If they do not discharge those responsibilities, society cannot thrive. Her doctrines were, in essence, social doctrines. She believed in individual freedom, but as part of a rule of law, and a devotion to the nation in which a citizen lives. She saw this model as existing best in Britain and in those English-speaking countries – notably the United States – born of similar traditions.

Historians will rightly scrutinise the detail. But in doing so, we must not forget the bigger picture in which the force of beliefs, the force of character and the force of what, incredibly, people used to call ''the weaker sex’’ came together in one woman. Mention the handbag as a political weapon, and everyone smiles, and knows what you mean. She created a legend, a story to tell to future generations – a story about how, if only you stop thinking you must lose, you can start to win.

After she had left office against her will, Margaret Thatcher was never reconciled. ''There’s so much to do!’’ she would exclaim, and she longed to be back in there doing it. Her love for her country was expressed even more in her action than in her words. As with all great loves, it was often spurned. But she was always true to it. Her love was deep, and we shall miss it more than we yet know.