There is No Alternative (9 page)

Anthony “Tony” Neil Wedgwood “Wedgie” Benn, a prominent figure on the Left wing of the Labour Party—the man whose proposals Keith Joseph savaged in his Upminster speech—was the grandson of First Baronet Sir John Benn and the son of the secretary of state for India, First Viscount Stansgate. Benn was educated at one of Britain's top-flight public schools. Ingham grew up in the West Yorkshire Pennines. His father was a cotton-weaver. Although
many of Thatcher's intimates came from the traditional British ruling class, a notable number did not. Some had not even graduated from university. Many came, like Ingham did, from a working-class background, or, like Thatcher herself, from a lower-middle-class background. A surprising number were Jewish, among them Keith Joseph. It was a government, in many respects, of outsiders, and this must be understood to appreciate both its revolutionary character and the hostility it inspired.

The thought of the Fabians and their quest to do good makes Ingham bulgy-eyed and red-faced; he punctuates this comment with table-pounding, then lapses, winded, into phlegmy coughing, prompting in me the slight concern that he is about to suffer a fit of apoplexy and keel over. The Fabian Society was the precursor to the Labour Party. Founded in 1884 to advance socialism by reform, rather than revolution, it took its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Cunctator, who proposed to exhaust the Carthaginians through a strategy of harassment and attrition. None of the Fabians' founding members came from a working-class background, and most came from money and privilege.

I have remarked that being a woman in a man's world was not necessarily the disadvantage it is often imagined to be. Nor was being a grocer's daughter in a world of guilty aristocrats. In the way only a Republican could go to China, Thatcher was able to pursue an anti-socialist agenda precisely because her class background lent her an ideological imprimatur. She and Ingham found each
other so sympathetic in part because they shared a thorough revulsion with the condescension of people who wanted to
do good
to them and people like them, when they felt themselves
quite good enough
as they were.

She challenged notions of class.
This is an absolutely key component of Thatcherism, and critical to understanding the emotions she inspired and still inspires in Britain.

There is not much that is missing at all, if you are looking for an account of the way Thatcher and her supporters saw themselves and what they told the world.

There are, of course, other perspectives.

Sir Bernard escorts me from the Morning Room and back to the streets of London, holding the doors open for me with a courtly flourish. The city is sparkling; the restaurants are full; the sushi
carousels are turning; the Chablis is flowing; the boutiques are selling bath salts made of organic lavender and crystallized kelp. “She stopped the
rot
in the old colonial power,” Sir Bernard offers as his parting thought. “She stopped the country from going to the dogs. And it was not in the best interests of the world that Britain should go to the dogs, because it had so much more to contribute to the world.”

I say good-bye, and I thank him for his time. I mean it sincerely. Anyone who has not spent a morning with Sir Bernard has missed one of life's great experiences.

As I head for the Tube, a man of about thirty passes me, walking purposefully, pecking at a Blackberry while simultaneously barking orders down his cell phone. “Still struggling with the flat refurb . . . yeah, brilliant . . . no, need the car at the
airport
. . . that's
utter
bollocks . . . Hong Kong that weekend, client meeting.” From his accent, I cannot precisely discern his class background, but clearly his parents did not live in a castle or hunt foxes.

A great many Britons found—and still find—such sights unnecessary, mad, and an odious challenge to the natural order of men.

In the mid-1980s, the prime minister was urged by her foreign office, against her better judgment, to receive a notorious Congolese communist at 10 Downing Street. No sooner had the hapless Marxist seated himself in her drawing room than she fixed him with an acid glare. She introduced herself with these words: “I
hate
communists.”

Mortified, the translator stammered, then rendered Thatcher's comments thus: “Prime Minister Thatcher says that she has never been wholly supportive of the ideas of Karl Marx.”
²⁵
One trusts that the visitor nonetheless guessed from her expression where he stood.

Hatred
of communism,
hatred
of Marxism,
hatred
of socialism—and an unflinching willingness to express that hatred in the clearest imaginable terms—was the core of Thatcherism. It was absolutely
sincere. It was absolutely personal. If American Cold Warriors deplored the tyranny imposed by communist regimes overseas—in faraway countries of which, frankly, they knew little if not nothing—Thatcher was affronted by the effects of Marxist dogma on her
own
country, an entirely different order of outrage.

The key theme of the election campaign that brought Thatcher to power in 1979 was the decline and humiliation wreaked upon Britain by socialism. In virtually every strategy document and public pronouncement from this campaign, we see the very deliberate association of socialism with wickedness and decay. “This election,” the 1979 Conservative Manifesto announced,

Socialism, Thatcher emphasized again and again, was against the grain of humanity's God-given nature. The manifesto bears her signature on the first page; the two Ts in her last name are crossed high above the stem of the letter. Graphologists would say this is the mark of an exceptionally ambitious, self-confident, optimistic person. For once those frauds would be right.

I bring up her handwriting because we are about to spend an afternoon in the Thatcher archives. Dull? Not at all. This is where we actually see and smell and touch the fossil record of history, the documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET—words that always give me a pleasurable
frisson,
even if the documents in question are tables of inflation statistics, long-since declassified. This is where we see her handwritten notes on speech drafts and policy memos—mostly illegible, alas, let the graphologists make of that what they will—but some of them perfectly clear. This is where we snoop through the notes and memoranda passed to her by her advisors under cover of that SECRET stamp, the documents that say the things politicians wouldn't dream of saying in public. This is the good part.

The Thatcher papers are housed in Churchill College, Cambridge.
²⁷
They are curated by Andrew Riley, a man whose welcoming warmth and enthusiasm for all things Thatcher calls to mind Willy Wonka's pride in his chocolate factory.
I, Andrew Riley, will
conduct you around the archives myself, showing you everything that there is to see, and afterwards, when it is time to leave, you will be escorted home by a collection of large CD-ROMs. These CD-ROMs, I can promise you, will be loaded with archival documents to last you and your entire household for many years!

Andrew whisks me off for several cups of strong coffee, then takes me up the modern stairs and down the modern hall to tour the paper collection. To enter the manuscript room he spins a huge steel dial—something manufactured by a military contractor, I suspect—and puts his whole weight against the heavy, reinforced door. The manuscript room feels like the interior of a spaceship: sterile, climate-controlled, not a mote of dust, unnaturally silent but for the mechanical hum of the air conditioner. Like an accordion, the shelves whoosh apart and re-whoosh shut at the twirl of a Meccano wheel. Hyperactive motion sensors control sliding glass partitions leading to an elevated overpass; they open if you even breathe too close to them, suggesting that they have a will of their own. Andrew shows me the stacks that contain the documents that are yet classified and will remain so for another generation. “Oh, can I just take a peek?” I ask.

Whoosh-whoosh,
the shelves glide shut
.
“Nope! Not for you.”

“Oh, come on. I won't tell anyone. It will be our little secret.”

“No, no, no! But come on, I have something even better to show you, “ he says cheerfully, ushering me along. I leave the forbidden section, looking reluctantly over my shoulder. The stacks go on for rows and rows; the archive contains over a million documents, 2,500 boxes, 300 meters of shelves, tens of thousands of photographs, a vast collection of press cuttings, audio tapes, video tapes. Andrew shows me what I'm allowed to look at, explains how the catalog system works, then, spinning smartly, beckons me to the back of the room. “Look!” he says, bouncing on his heels with excitement, pointing to a gunmetal-grey box on a raised platform.