There is No Alternative (50 page)

Before she even returned to London, it was already over.

On the evening of November 21, a series of ministers visited her in Downing Street. They told her, one by one, that she had lost the support of the party. She would not win the second round.

“She looked calm, almost beautiful,” wrote Clark.

Clark was the only one who encouraged her. The others hewed to their script. “As I well realized,” Thatcher writes, “they had been
feverishly discussing what to say in the rooms off the Commons Cabinet corridor above my room. Like all politicians in a quandary, they had sorted out their ‘line to take' and they would cling to it through thick and thin. After three or four interviews, I felt I could almost join the chorus.”

Of course I support you,
they told her, one by one.
This is a travesty. You have my complete loyalty. But we're outnumbered—you're going to lose. You must step down, so that we can defeat Heseltine, who will destroy everything you've worked for . . .

“I was sick at heart,” Thatcher remembers. “I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; but what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words by which they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.”

After the last visitor left, she dictated a brief statement. She would resign.

“They demonstrated the ruthlessness of the officer class,” says Kinnock. “It was quite an operation, but they got rid of her. And I had to tell my people, ‘Celebrate, and get drunk tonight, and then wake up in the morning and know that we have just lost our greatest political asset.' Which is the truth.”

It is said that Ted Heath cried “Rejoice! Rejoice!” when he heard the news. When later he was asked whether he had indeed said this, he replied no: He hadn't said “rejoice” twice, he'd said it
three
times.

I remember where I was when I heard. Everyone who lived in Britain then would. I was in Holywell Manor, the graduate annex of Balliol College. There had been rumors all week that she might resign, that Heseltine would challenge her, but truly, no one believed it would really happen. It was inconceivable. I had never known a Britain in which Margaret Thatcher wasn't the prime minister.

A student burst through the door, shouting:
She's resigned!

Everyone knew who “she” was. Almost everyone in earshot began cheering, punching the air. The elderly porter in the porter's lodge looked stricken. We raced to the lone television set in the building to follow the story. The college bar was opened early. All day long there were choruses of “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” That night, at least a dozen students were found passed out or vomiting in the rose bushes.
²⁶⁹

On November 28, the prime minister tendered her resignation to the Queen. One week later, she was driven away from Downing Street.

She was in tears.

Kinnock called for a motion of no confidence in the Conservative government. In defeat, Thatcher seized the opportunity to deliver one of her most astonishing performances. “Each sentence,” she recalls, “was my testimony at the bar of History. It was as if I were speaking for the last time, rather than merely for the last time as Prime Minister.”

She began by recalling Nicholas Henderson's famous missive from Paris describing the state of Britain when she took power: “We talk of ourselves without shame as being one of the less prosperous countries of Europe,” she quoted from the dispatch. The prognosis for Britain in 1979, she reminded those present, was terminal decline.

“Conservative government has changed all that,” she reminded the House. “Once again, Britain stands tall in the councils of Europe and of the world, and our policies have brought unparalleled prosperity to our citizens at home.”

“The average pensioner now has twice as much to hand on to his children as he did 11 years ago . . . ”

“We are no longer the sick man of Europe . . . ”

“Britain no longer has an overmanned, inefficient, backward manufacturing sector, but modern, dynamic industries . . . ”

“We have worked for our vision of a Europe which is free and open to the rest of the world, and above all to the countries of eastern Europe as they emerge from the shadows of socialism . . .”

In the middle of this speech, an immortal moment:

 

The Prime Minister:
I am
enjoying
this!

 

This is the astonishing thing: She genuinely
does
appear to be enjoying this. I would swear she is having a simply splendid time. It is a bravura performance. Sheer arrant pride, bustling about as if she hadn't a single care, chest out, immaculately powdered and lacquered, not a trace of self-pity. If ever I am thus humiliated, I pray I could put on a face like that.

They knew it, too, the House. They were in the presence of an indomitable spirit. You can see it and you can hear it—they are watching her and thinking,
My God, she's magnificent.
And a heartbeat later:
My God, what have we done?

“Under our leadership, Britain has been just as influential in shaping the wider Europe and the relations between East and West. Ten years ago, the eastern part of Europe lay under totalitarian rule, its people knowing neither rights nor liberties. Today, we have a Europe in which democracy, the rule of law and basic human rights are spreading ever more widely, where the threat to
our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw pact has been removed: where the Berlin wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end.”

“There is something else which one feels. That is a sense of this country's destiny: the centuries of history and experience which ensure that, when principles have to be defended, when good has to be upheld and when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms.

“
It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today
!”
²⁷⁰

The House was stunned.

The motion of no confidence was defeated, 367 to 247.

But it was too late: She was gone.

The title of this book implies a doubt. A book called
Why Hitler Matters
would be inherently absurd; no one doubts that he mattered and no one needs to be told why. But the title of this book also implies a conviction. No one would write a book called
Why John Major Matters.
We know full well that he doesn't.

You picked up this book because you know already that Thatcher is significant. But how significant is she, and why?

I do not propose to appeal to judgments only time can make. No one now asks whether Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were historical figures of enduring significance. They were judged as massive during their lifetimes; these judgments proved correct. But we should remember that a similar assessment was once made of Chiang Kai-shek. He was believed by his contemporaries to be—I quote now from the Chiang Anthem, and I reckon I would lose no money by betting that this is not on your iPod—“the savior of mankind, the greatest person in the whole world, the lighthouse of freedom, the Great Wall of democracy.” He bustled and strutted over the world stage; he was the darling of American conservatives and a fulcrum of great power politics.
Nonetheless, professional historians of China apart, no one now thinks of Chiang as one of the pivotal figures of human history. No one today would write a book titled
Why Chiang Matters.
I assume that quite a number of my readers will need to go to Wikipedia to remind themselves who he was.

Will Margaret Thatcher be placed among the pantheon of politicians with enduring significance? Or will she pass, like Chiang, into the fog of history? I cannot tell you. No one can.

I can only tell you why she matters to us now.