Mrs Thatcher’s success in moving British politics decisively to the right now seems unquestionable, and is perhaps best summed up in the ironic remark that her greatest legacy was the politics of Tony Blair and New Labour. But the costs of enacting her agenda and laying the foundations for her eponymous beliefs were always clearer to those who felt the direct consequences of her reign rather than her legions of foreign admirers. Even within the party, the toll of her righteousness eventually became insufferable. When resigning from the Tory cabinet in November 1990, shortly before the Iron Lady herself was ousted in a dramatic intra-party coup, her deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe compared the strain of working under her leadership to that of a pair of opening batsmen realising “the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”
Despite its public-school phrasing, Howe’s remark nicely captures the toll a decade of embattled politics had taken on the Conservative revolutionaries who set the stage, along with their divisive American counterparts, for the golden age of supply-side economics and unapologetic neoliberalism. In large part this stemmed from Thatcher’s unshakeable conviction that her rigid political and economic choices were beyond doubt. Several obituarists have noted Thatcher’s fascination with and practically quasi-religious attachment to a handful of political first principles. Her uncritical embrace of free markets came almost verbatim from the work of the Austrian economist F A Hayek and the conservative American economist Milton Friedman. In her infamous handbag she used to have a newspaper clipping that quoted Abraham Lincoln denying that one could “strengthen the weak by weakening the strong” or “bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.”
From a biographer’s point of view, her fondness for these ideas can seem inevitable. (Her father was an industrious grocer in a provincial town and Thatcher ascended the ranks of the Conservative party long before it was disposed to the meretricious ‘compassion’ used to rebrand the post-Clinton Republican Party across the pond.) But it is also clear that Thatcher spoke for a sizeable portion of the British middle class. The political scholar Ewen Green has shown that her political instincts were solidly representative of a Conservative base that profoundly distrusted managed economies and the welfare state, and that even her most unpopular measure, the riot-provoking poll-tax, was widely supported by grassroots Conservatives rather than dreamed up in a moment of imperial hauteur.
Nobody familiar with the closure of British coal mines, or the fantastically large sums of wealth transferred during the privatization of British industry can view the Thatcher years dispassionately. Apologists argue, with some justification, that Thatcher was a necessary antidote to the unchecked power of the unions and the only viable alternative to spiralling inflation and economic stagnation. Others blame her for heartlessly dismantling whole communities in the pursuit of abstract economic ideals.
Further afield her decisions were no less consequential. Her success in the Falklands War certainly influenced the calculations of the first President Bush when he launched the first Gulf War, and she was subsequently a high-profile booster for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She notoriously invited Gen Pinochet to tea when he nearly fell into the hands of a crusading Spanish judge, and she refused to speak ill of General Suharto. The only thing stronger than her indomitable sense of being right seems to have been her capacity for forgetting when she was shamefully wrong. In 1987, for example, she declared that “the ANC is a typical terrorist organisation [and anyone] who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.”
Ultimately Thatcherism was deeply compromised by its anti-democratic instincts. Its ideological origins were never as extreme as detractors like to claim, but Mrs Thatcher’s imperial manner often made them seem so. The level of vituperation in political commentary, both in Britain and the United States, peaked in the Thatcher years and has remained unacceptably high ever since.
It is always tempting to imagine a level of political civility that never really existed, but some sense of what was lost can be conveyed in a short exchange between the economist John Maynard Keynes and F A Hayek. En route to the Bretton Woods conference, Keynes read Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom and wrote the author to say that “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement.” But while Keynes liked the idea of free markets as a bulwark against the sort of tyranny Hayek had fled in Europe, he added, “You admit here and there that it is a question of knowing where to draw the line … But you give us no guidance whatever as to where to draw it.” Thatcher drew this line boldly, then arrogantly, and often erroneously, deep into neoliberal territory. One measure of her decided mixed legacy is the fumbling attempts of so many less confident contemporary politicians to readjust her boundaries.
