Thatcher's "Place" in English History

An Early Assessment

We well remember the outpouring of disgust and incandescent hatred, yet also sadness, respect, and public honour that accompanied the death of Margaret Thatcher.  It seemed that her passing was significant to so many for the exact opposite reasons.

We recall that a local radio station played Maggie, the lament by Foster and Allen, to mark her death.



But what was her significance, really?  It's probably still too early for historians to write a balanced perspective that captures the genuinely historic aspects of her Prime Ministership.  Robert Tombs, at the end of his magisterial volume, The English and Their History makes an attempt.

We think our readers will appreciate his "take" on a most remarkable leader, seen in the light of England's longer, wider, deeper past.

Margaret Thatcher was the most admired and most hated--indeed, the only deeply admired and genuinely hated--Prime Minister since 1940.  . . . Her progress from Grantham corner shop to Downing Street became literally a legend in her own lifetime, with Hollywood gloss.  The conflicting versions--the dauntless Boadicea who conquered national decline versus the malignant harpy who shattered the working class--magnify her personal importance.  They have remoulded modern political identifies into Thatcherite and anti-Thatcherite--a personalization of political ideas not seen since Sir Robert Peel. . . . [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p. 817.]

For living memory at least, she will be identified with the great "turnaround" in Britain.  In the seventies, Britain was seen as a has-been power, a crumbling nation, whose glories were former, not current, and certainly not to be its future.  During Thatcher's prime ministership all that changed.  "Britain was back", as they say.  Naturally, such a radical national volte-face was not achieved single-handedly.  Historical causation is always a complex and at times a very messy business.  Notwithstanding that, however, Thatcher was in the middle of it all, and cannot be causally disassociated from it.

She is still the only woman who has risen from nowhere--not as the member of a political dynasty--to make a comparable political impact on any large state.  The only European comparison more than three decades later is Angela Merkel, a political insider, not the conqueror of a sceptical party in which snobbery and sexism were standard (some of its staff used the acronym TBW--"that bloody woman.") . . . .

She was continually in conflict with ministerial colleagues, especially at times of crisis: . . . Her personality aggravated the problem: in the words of one friend and admirer, "judged by the ordinary criteria of man-management, or of efficiency, or even those of Christian charity, she was often at fault," hectoring and humiliating.  More fundamental, and part of the explanation for her relentless combativeness, was the fact that she was usually isolated in the highest reaches of politics and officialdom, not expected to survive long, and at first not taken seriously.  [Ibid., p.818]

Britain, of course, has seen its share of strong female leaders.  The two Elizabeths (I & II) are clear examples, not to overlook Victoria in her earlier years.  But Thatcher was an outsider, not part of the Establishment.

More than any Prime Minister since Gladstone (not the only resemblance), she relied on supporters outside Westminster and Whitehall.  To many on the left, especially feminists, her personality and her sex added to their loathing--how dare the pioneer woman be a hardline Tory reeking of suburbia!  Moreover, she "shredded" the Labour Party ideologically--the unkindest cut of all.  Ever since, to the despair of many of its activists, the British left has been politically and intellectually on the defensive.  [Ibid., p.818]

Ah, yes, we still chuckle over the time when Thatcher was facing down the Soviet Union and was expressing a strong positive commitment to Britain's retention and expansion of its nuclear arsenal.  We happened to overhear a conversation between two hip female lefties browsing in the Auckland University Bookshop.  They were aghast that Thatcher was not taking the feminist position on banning the bomb.  How dare she betray the "woman's position" on nuclear weapons.  The arrogance and the ignorance on display that afternoon gave us a measure of hope for the future.  As Mao would have put it, those ladies were paper tigers, with the intellectual weight and incoherence of the easily led and manipulated.

In summary,

. . . . Nigel Lawson, a Chancellor of the Exchequer and core Thatcherite who finally turned against her, summarized Thatcherism retrospectively as "a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, 'Victorian values' . . . privatization and a dash of populism.  But we should beware  of attributing too much ideological coherence to the policies of one who combined basic principles with political pragmatism.  Thatcher's long period in office was one of constant and testing crises, but not always the same ones: inflation, strikes, Ireland, the Cold War, the Falklands, Europe.  "Thatcherism" evolved as its circumstances changed.  [Ibid., p. 819.]

They say we are aged and grey, Maggie,
As sprays by the white breakers flung,
But to me you're as fair as you were, Maggie,
When you and I were young.