There is No Alternative (3 page)

This is not a conventional biography of Margaret Thatcher. I do not chronicle her life from cradle to coffin. Nor is this an insider's memoir. Although I lived in Britain during the latter half of the Thatcher era, I did not know her and have not met her. I have created my portrait of her from biographies, from archival documents, and above all from speaking to people who did know her.

She is one of the most controversial figures of the second half of the twentieth century—worshipped, loathed, feted, mocked, her significance alternately exaggerated beyond reason and scornfully dismissed, sometimes by the same person in the same sentence. Everyone connected to her, it seems, has his or her own vividly imagined and almost supernatural Margaret Thatcher. No two Thatchers are exactly alike. I emphasize in this book the divergence of views about her rather than the similarities. I also emphasize the historiographical challenges of judging her impact upon Britain and the world. I do this not to advance an obscure postmodern thesis, but to illustrate the complexity of her personality and legacy.

My own view? I find her fascinating. I believe she was enormously significant. In fact, I believe she changed the world, and mostly for the better. I am nonetheless skeptical of some of the more hagiographic claims made on her behalf. But if this book is not a single-minded defense of Thatcher, this is in part because
there is no need for one. She was, after all—far more than most people—exceptionally capable of defending herself. She has done so very ably in her autobiography. When she passes, the army of her devout will carry the torch and will need no help from me.

My aim instead has been to offer a portrait, seen through a prism, of an extraordinary personality and towering historical figure—a woman whose influence extends far beyond Great Britain and far beyond her moment in power.

I have also attempted to answer two questions. How do some people become larger than life?

And why, in particular, did she?

 

 

By TOBY HARNDEN

July 27, 2007

Several weeks before the article above was published, I too was in London, chatting with Sir Bernard Ingham about his memories of Margaret Thatcher. Sir Bernard spent the years from 1979 to 1990—almost all of her time in power—as her chief press secretary at 10 Downing Street. He saw everything.

I joined him for coffee at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall, a street of elite gentlemen's clubs in the heart of London. Most of these clubs now admit women, but this is a recent development. Nearby, the archly Tory Carlton Club maintains its traditional gentlemen-only policy. Its members were in an awkward position when Margaret Thatcher was elected, for London's preeminent Conservative club could hardly exclude a Conservative prime minister, but conservatives—in the technical sense of the word—couldn't rush about changing things with every passing fad. At last they settled upon a solution. They declared her an honorary gentleman.

The Institute of Directors is a grand, flag-waving London landmark. Its marmoreal Doric and Corinthian columns sprout arris-beads of laurel leaves; gas-flambeaux lamps line up like solemn soldiers along its stone balustrades. These days, the members of the club are, as its name suggests, captains of industry, but the Institute was once the United Services Club, and its membership, according to Dickens's
Dictionary of London
, was restricted to “officers not under the rank of commander in the navy, or major in the army.” Inside, the marble busts of long-forgotten noblemen commune
quietly with oil portraits of their long-forgotten friends, reminiscing about the Crimean War, appalled by the sight of businessmen scuttling about the club with their ghastly cell phones, looking as if they'd have no idea which end of the rifle to shoot from
.

Sir Bernard and I are sitting in the Morning Room, where we chat for a while about Britain before Thatcher (“
totally
shabby”) and the privatization of British industries (“
astonishingly
successful”). He is a bluff, meat-featured man who becomes passionately exercised at the thought of the British Left—“a nasty, scheming lot, crawling out of their holes in the
grrrrrrround!
”—and when he says this his voice booms and his brandy jowls shake and his Rs
rrrrrrroll
in the manner of a Yorkshire clergyman on the pulpit. He was and is Thatcher's devoutly loyal friend. But he hardly strives to conceal the degree of her current infirmity.

I believe Sir Bernard. He has no reason to exaggerate. Others who visit her regularly told me the same, in so many words. When I called her office at the House of Lords to see if it might be possible to meet her, her secretary politely told me I shouldn't even dream of it.

Thatcher has now had several strokes. On good days, say her oldest friends, she remembers who they are. Sir Bernard visits her faithfully, and when he does he pretends to brief her on the issues of the moment, the way he used to when she was the most powerful woman in the world. She enjoys this but often can't remember how the conversation began.

Given this, you have to ask: What could Rudy Giuliani hope to gain from a discussion with her? I have been told that she does at least
recognize
Giuliani, but I can only imagine that her response to the sight of Fred Thompson would be mystification. Was he accompanied by his spectacular young wife, the one who is always photographed in plunging décolletage? Thompson used to be an actor, like Thatcher's great friend Ronald Reagan. Perhaps he mentioned this to her, hoping to suggest that he, like Reagan, could readily slip into the role of leader of the Free World. I cannot imagine he got very far. Thatcher, said the satirists, stood for a Britain that was “proud, profitable and ever so prim.” Whatever one may think about Nancy Reagan, she did not inspire jokes about pole dancing.

No, I doubt these meetings are greatly edifying to any party concerned. So why are they taking place? Why do the most ambitious men in America traverse the ocean to kiss her hand? Why is it
she
who grants
them
an audience? Why is her answer to the question
Who, in your opinion, should lead the most powerful nation
in the world?
not only important to Americans, but somehow sanctified in a way no other living person's could be?

Why has Margaret Thatcher become a living shrine?

The answer to this question has three parts.

First,
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most vigorous, determined, and successful enemies of socialism the world has known.

There are as many species of socialism as there are species of insects, and Thatcher loathed them all. I use the word “socialism” here as a shorthand for a system of government in which property is largely owned or controlled by the state, rather than by individual citizens, and in which wealth is redistributed to create a more egalitarian society. Equality is the
ideal,
coerced redistribution the
means,
the state the
agent.
I also use the word “socialism” to compass both weak and extreme versions of this system. Britain before Thatcher was a weakly socialist nation in that many of its major industries and utilities were nationalized and rates of taxation high—and by “high” I mean
really
high, with top rates of 98 percent—but most private property rights remained. In the Soviet Union, almost no private property rights remained. I use the word “communism” to refer to the latter system, which I classify as a species of socialism.
²

It is almost hard to remember now, but it must be remembered that when Thatcher came to power, in 1979, socialism, communism, and doctrinal Marxism were still taken extremely seriously,
not only in the Eastern bloc but in much of the West and the developing world. The Soviet Union presided over a vast, miserable, subjugated empire. The 1970s had been a banner decade for international communism: In Southeast Asia, communist regimes had seized Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam; pro-Soviet factions had captured Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Grenada, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and South Yemen. Spain and Portugal were lurching leftward.

Britain's Labour Party, which since the inter-war period had either been in power or been by far the largest party in opposition, remained committed to Clause 4 of its constitution:

I repeat:
common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Although these words were written in 1918, they are not ancient history. Clause 4 was not abandoned until 1995, two years before Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair took power. Unless you are still in elementary school, you were alive when this was the official platform of what is now Britain's ruling party.

The final decade of the twentieth century was marked by a dramatic, global disenchantment with Marxist theory and experiments. This disenchantment had many causes, not least among them the poverty of the theory and the failure of the experiments, but Thatcher's anti-socialist revolution in Britain, combined with the impact of her personality on the international stage, contributed to it significantly. By setting a domestic example of socialism reversed, she proved a point: The forces of history did
not
inevitably lead to socialism, as Marx had predicted, nor was it true that once socialism arrived, there could be no going back. She thus prompted observers around the world to ask a crucial question: Why must
we
have socialism? After all, Britain got rid of it.