2

La Pasionaria of Middle-Class Privilege

Let me give you my vision. A man’s right to work as he will. To spend what he earns. To own property. To have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance.

—THATCHER’S FIRST SPEECH
TO THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY
CONFERENCE AS PARTY LEADER

To place the rest of this book in context, we must take a biographical detour. Don’t skim this part! You must understand where she came from to understand what she accomplished.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, above her father’s grocery shop. If you look at a map of England, Grantham is about a third of the way between London and the Scottish border, slightly to the east of Britain’s midline. Isaac Newton, too, was raised in Grantham, and in between, nothing of note happened there. Grantham was twice voted Britain’s most boring city in national polls. It is known for its production of diesel engines and road rollers. I was on a train that stopped there once. It is a flat, featureless town of red-brick houses, all roughly alike. As the train idled in the station, I wondered for a moment if I should get out to take a closer look. I peered from the rain-streaked window at the dreary expanse of low-slung brick buildings. In the distance lay a food-processing plant. I looked up at the slate-colored sky. I stayed in my seat.

Hers was a lower-middle-class, piously Methodist family of no distinction. During her time in power, rumors circulated persistently that somehow, through some ancestral illegitimate dalliance, nobility had slipped into her bloodline. No evidence for it at all. The rumors themselves are significant, though, for they suggest the depth of Britain’s obsession with breeding and class. Never were there rumors, by contrast, that Bill Clinton’s grandmother had trysted with a Kennedy; no one in America believed it literally impossible for a leader of his stature to have surfaced from an Arkansas trailer park milieu. Americans don’t think that way.

Her father, Alfred Roberts, was a town alderman and for a short time Grantham’s mayor, so she was exposed to politics from her earliest childhood, but he earned his living as a grocer. He was a Wesleyan lay preacher. This is a significant point. Lay preaching was one of the few ways a man of his epoch and class background could acquire ease and fluency as a public speaker. He thereby inherited a famously eloquent oratorical tradition and passed it on to his daughter. Margaret Thatcher’s speaking career began in childhood, on Sundays, when she read from the high pulpit.

Her mother was a dressmaker. Thatcher revered her father and spoke of him often; she almost never spoke of her mother. No one knows why she didn’t, but everyone thinks it significant. It is a clue, it is said, albeit an opaque one, to understanding her ambition and the nature of her interactions with men.

Margaret Roberts spent her youth, according to the legend she later assiduously promoted, carefully weighing flour and counting change in the family shop, learning the housewifely principles of industry and thrift that subsequently informed her economic policy. Clearly this legend is not the whole story; there is no obvious path between measuring flour and championing monetarism. But like many legends it contains elements of truth. Even if her political philosophy clearly emerged from other influences as well, her class background—that frugal, industrious, Methodist upbringing—was crucially important to informing her worldview.

Britain’s aristocracy tends to be educated at public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, which are not public schools in the American sense, but rather exclusive private ones. Margaret Roberts went to the local grammar school, a public school in the American sense. She was an exceptionally hardworking student and self-righteous, even as a child, about her unnatural discipline. At the age of nine, she was congratulated by her school headmistress for her luck in winning a poetry-reading contest. “I wasn’t lucky,” she replied. “I deserved it.”

Through her diligence she earned a place at Somerville College at Oxford University. Oxford’s self-governing colleges, of which there are now thirty-nine, are united in something like a federal system. At that time only a small number of these colleges admitted women; Somerville was an all-women’s college.

By the time I arrived at Oxford, roughly half a century later, all of its colleges admitted women. My college, Balliol, had done so for only a decade, however, and the ratio of men to women at the graduate level was still about five to one. It is commonly assumed that being a woman in this largely male environment must have been a terrible disadvantage for her, and I am sure that at times this was so. She was unable to join the Oxford Union, for example, the debating club that is the traditional first step to a parliamentary career. But from personal experience I can say that for a woman of the right temperament, this environment was a huge advantage. “Largely male” need not mean “male-dominated.” If you were one of only a handful of women among a group of young men who have barely seen a woman before in their lives—sex-segregated schools were and still are common in Britain—it was almost trivially easy to stand out from the crowd, terrify your peers, receive special attention from your tutors, and be the cynosure of any social gathering. It was a clearly observable law that the more bitterly a woman could be heard complaining of the university’s institutional sexism, the more likely it was that she was ugly, hopelessly passive, or not all that bright. If Thatcher subsequently had no patience with feminists—“Some of us were making it before Women’s Lib was even thought of,” she once snapped—I would wager it was because she made precisely the same observation.

Politically, she did well for herself at Oxford, becoming president of the university’s Conservative Association. Academically, she did less well; she took a Second Class degree in chemistry. Oxford degrees are classified into Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds; they are awarded based on a student’s performance in a single set of exams at the end of a three- or four-year study period. That she received a Second might be seen as evidence for a claim commonly made about her, to wit, that she was a woman of relatively modest intellectual gifts. On the other hand, when she subsequently decided to become a lawyer, she qualified after only two years of part-time study, all the while working full-time as a research chemist and assiduously seeking election to Parliament and getting pregnant—with twins, no less. She passed the bar exam only weeks after giving birth. However hardworking you are, I doubt you can do that without being quite fast on the draw.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. After graduating from Oxford, she worked in an Essex plastics factory while immersing herself in politics. She ran for a seat in Parliament twice, in 1950 and 1951, both times unsuccessfully. She had not been expected to win. The contested constituency was a Labour safe seat; running an inherently doomed campaign or two is a political rite of passage in Britain. But she gave her opponent an unexpectedly vigorous workout. Her uncommon energy in campaigning was widely remarked.

She was only twenty-three when she made her second attempt. In the same year she became engaged to Denis Thatcher, whom she met while campaigning. He was the heir to a prosperous chemicals business. Here the story of Margaret Roberts, the middle-class girl from a background of no special privilege, comes to an end. She believed in earning money the old-fashioned way, she always averred, and she earned hers in the most old-fashioned way of all: She married it. Her subsequent career might have been possible without her husband’s money, but it wouldn’t have been easier. This marriage was one of her shrewdest political decisions. It appears to have been a genuine love match, too; by all accounts the Thatchers were utterly devoted to each other. As mothers the world around have traditionally reminded their daughters, it is just as easy to love a rich man as a poor one.

Let us take a detour within a detour and return to Sir Bernard Ingham, to whom we have been speaking at the Institute of Directors. Ingham is the man who, more than anyone except Thatcher herself, invented the Margaret Thatcher legend. As her press secretary, Ingham was responsible for managing her image in the media, and in Thatcher’s own words, “He never let me down.”¹¹

Ingham is a convert, and like many converts, uncommonly devout. He was a member of the Labour Party and in his youth ran, unsuccessfully, as a Labour candidate for the city council in Leeds. Before joining the civil service in 1967, he worked as a journalist for the Guardian, Britain’s leading organ of socialist sanctimony. After winning the 1979 general election, Thatcher met him, took an instant liking to him, and plucked him from his obscure position as a civil service under-secretary. It was a curious decision, particularly because she was later known for sniffing out and at the soonest feasible opportunity extirpating the ideologically suspect from her inner circle. But as usual, her political instincts proved shrewd. Ingham became the truest of the blue believers, serving her faithfully until her downfall.

His views about Thatcher are important. Why? Because they represent the Party line. This is how Thatcher wanted herself to be understood. And because her press secretary was good at his job, this is widely how she was understood.

He describes the background from which she emerged thus:

BI: We should not forget her upbringing . . . You’re not going to get anywhere unless you work like stink, there are no prizes in this world for not working, you know, and you really will have to apply yourself, girl, and I suppose the unspoken words were, “and especially since you are a girl.” You could also say it comes from this non-conformist Methodism in which she was brought up. And they are an identifiable people, they’re no longer really identifiable except among my generation, but they were identifiable then. And of course she wasn’t part of a privileged upbringing, like so many members of her cabinet . . . I think she got the resolution from her father, who if he taught her anything, it was to stand up against the herd, never go with the herd if you think the herd is wrong, he told her. And she never went with the herd.

CB: What I’m trying to understand is the iron confidence that she projected, did that—

BI: Projected?

CB: Exactly. How deep did it go? Was it a compensation for an underlying sense of insecurity?

BI: I do not think you should play up the insecurity in her character. I think there was a basic insecurity there in her class and upbringing and sex. I think that is what caused her to be very careful and deliberate in what she did. But it was not allowed to undermine her determination to do what she believed to be right. Her father had told her that she must do what she knew to be right. And she revered her father. She was in many ways her father’s son.

CB: You just said that she was her father’s son.

BI: Well, I mean, she was.

She did what was right, she did what was right, she did what was right. She did it because her father told her to. She repeated those words over and over until through the hypnotic power of repetition they appeared at last to blaze from her forehead. If it is also true that she did what was practical and politically expedient—in fact, she was a master of the art of the possible, particularly gifted at fighting only the battles she could win—this was not the part of her personality she showcased.

Alderman Roberts’s “son” won a seat in the House of Commons in 1959. The Conservatives were in power under Harold Macmillan. At thirty-four, she was the youngest woman in the House. In 1961, she became parliamentary under-secretary for pensions and national insurance. She was known in this position for her extraordinary mastery of economic statistics and for her good looks. “I have the latest red hot figure,” she once announced to the House, inadvertently parodying herself on both scores. She was momentarily baffled by the ensuing hilarity.

The Tories were ousted in 1964 and spent the next six years in opposition. Thatcher served in a number of shadow cabinet posts, and again her reputation was for diligence and a remarkable memory for statistics. I have neither heard anyone say nor read anywhere that during this period anyone recognized in her the leader she was to become. Said one colleague: “We all smiled benignly as we looked into those blue eyes and at the tilt of the golden head. We, and all the world, had no idea what we were in for.”¹²

 

Margaret Thatcher is unveiled as the new leader of the Conservative Party on February 11, 1975. This photo captures what one of her speechwriters, the playwright Ronnie Millar, referred to as the “senior girl-scout freshness about her.” Many men commented upon this (“golden”—“girlish”—“trusting”—“innocent”) as she rose up through the Commons. These qualities, said Millar, were “rather appealing . . . as though she had stepped right out of The Sound of Music.” (Courtesy of Graham Wiltshire)

It was said of her, remarkably often, that she was pretty. If you have seen unflattering photos of her in late middle-age you may find yourself puzzled by this. But the young Margaret Thatcher was in fact blonde, clear-skinned, pleasantly round, and, of course, young. This was all the more striking because Britons of the postwar era generally looked awful. The stereotype of the Englishman with bad teeth does not come from nowhere. Wartime and postwar rationing had taken a nutritional toll; health care, while provided by the state, was also rationed by the state, and cosmetic dentistry was not the state’s priority. If it is now quite common for women in London to spend a hundred pounds to have their hair colored, at that time only women married to very wealthy men, as Thatcher was, could afford the luxury of good grooming. Her grooming was always immaculate.

By the end of the 1960s, unemployment was steadily rising, and so was the tempo of trade union disputes. During the 1970 general election campaign, the Conservatives, led by Edward Heath, proposed a healing elixir of free-market economics, trade union re-form, tax cuts, and spending restraints. They won. Heath named Thatcher secretary of state for education and science, and it was in this position that she first gained national notoriety. She abolished a program to provide free milk to schoolchildren, earning the nickname “Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher.” The slogan “Ditch the Bitch” also became common currency and remained so until she resigned from the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1991.

When unemployment passed the million-man mark in 1972, Heath retreated from the Party’s platform in what has infamously been termed a series of U-turns. He poured money from the taxpayer coffers into flagging British industries and retreated from confrontation with the unions. This served only to embolden them. In 1973, directly after the announcement of the Arab oil embargo, Britain’s electricity and coal workers declared an overtime ban. It is only slightly hyperbolic to imagine this analogy:

The New York Times
Tuesday, September 12, 2001
HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT
PENTAGON IN DAY OF TERROR
New York’s Firefighters Declare Overtime Ban

Heath’s government declared a state of emergency, imposing a three-day industrial work-week to save energy. A two-day week was in prospect. Power cuts became the norm. In 1974, faced with the threat of an all-out miners’ strike, Heath called a general election. His campaign slogan was Who governs Britain? The voters answered. You sure as hell don’t.

The Labour Party took power under Harold Wilson, and from this defeat, Thatcherism was born.

The Conservative politician Keith Joseph was the intellectual force behind Thatcherism. Joseph was Thatcher’s mentor; he in turn was strongly influenced by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. In 1974, Joseph delivered a speech at Upminster that may be taken as the first public expression of full-throated Thatcherism. The title itself—“This Is Not the Time to Be Mealy-Mouthed: Intervention Is Destroying Us”—embodied what would come to be Thatcher’s thematic signature: aggression, a sense of emergency, a contemptuous rejection of conciliatory language, the association of government intervention with such words as “destroy.” Intervention in this semantic landscape is not “unhelpful” or “doing more harm than good”; it is destroying us. And it is destroying us, mind you, the British people: Never was nationalism far from the surface.

Joseph delivered this speech in response to plans unveiled by the Labour government’s industry secretary, Tony Benn, to extend public control over the most profitable areas of British industry. “It is not enough just to stave off Benn’s preposterous proposals,” Joseph intoned:

The question we must all ask ourselves is how Mr. Benn was able to come within striking distance of the very heart of our economic life in the first place. How could it come about that the suggestions could even be made by a minister of the Crown after a generation’s experience of state ownership of a fifth of our economy? How could anyone expect that the idea of “more of the same” which has nearly brought us to our knees could be seriously entertained?

We must find a satisfactory answer to these questions if we are really concerned with our survival as a free and prosperous nation.

Of course, there is more than one answer. But an important part of the answer must be that our industry, economic life and society have been so debilitated by 30 years of socialistic fashions that their very weakness tempts further inroads . . .

There is no good reason why this country should continue to fail. We have ample talent, the same kind of talent that made Britain great and prosperous a hundred years ago, the envy of the world . . .

We are now more socialist in many ways than any other developed country outside the communist bloc—in the size of the public sector, the range of controls and the telescoping of net income.

And what is the result? Compare our position today with that of our neighbors in northwest Europe—Germany, Sweden, Holland, France. They are no more talented than we are. Yet, compared with them, we have the longest working hours, the lowest pay and the lowest production per head . . .

We have achieved what seemed impossible. We have poured never-ending flows of real resources into coal, rail and shipbuilding, among others, yet after 30 years they are as ailing and problematic as ever . . .

These are the lean kine which, as in Pharaoh’s dream, are eating the healthy cows—the productive sector of the economy—and yet remain as hungry as ever.¹³

The biblical allusion is particularly significant; not only does it suggest the origins of Joseph’s nickname—the Mad Monk—but it foreshadows Thatcher’s preoccupation with socialism as sin. Indeed, in a 1978 speech concerning Christianity and politics, she specifically described the core of socialism not merely as a folly, but a heresy:

. . . there is one heresy which it seems to me that some political doctrines embrace.

It is the belief that Man is perfectible.

This takes the form of supposing that if we get our social institutions right—if we provide properly for education, health and all other branches of social welfare—we shall have exorcised the Devil. This is bad theology and it also conflicts with our own experience.¹⁴

Her fluent command of both the Old and the New Testaments was a notable aspect of her political personality. She held, she said, a “personal belief in the relevance of Christianity to public policy.” ¹⁵ Not only was she intimately familiar with the prophets of yore, she was prepared to associate herself among their ranks. “The Old Testament prophets,” she remarked in a campaign speech,

didn’t go out into the highways saying, “Brothers, I want consensus.” They said, “This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!” And they preached it. We have a message. Go out, preach it, practice it, fight for it—and the day will be ours!¹⁶

It is said that she once began a speech with the words “As God once said, and I think rightly,” but the story is, alas, apocryphal. That these words are so often attributed to her nonetheless suggests the nature of the woman.

Although widely considered Thatcher’s intellectual superior, the Mad Monk was a political incompetent who destroyed his own chances of becoming prime minister by delivering an ill-considered speech, in 1974, urging poor British women to take more care with their contraception. To many this sounded suspiciously like a call to solve Britain’s economic problems with eugenics. Thus did Thatcher inherit his legacy, and thus did his legacy come to be given her name.

In the early 1970s, Joseph and Thatcher founded the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank devoted to promoting Joseph’s distinct form of conservatism, now termed Thatcherism. What Thatcherism is, precisely, is a matter of some debate, even if Bernard Ingham finds it a simple concept:

CB: If you were asked to define Thatcherism—as opposed to Conservatism—would you have a ready definition at hand?

BI: Common sense.

CB: Common sense?

BI: Resolute common sense!

The words “common sense” featured largely in her campaign literature and speeches. They were on the first page of her 1979 election manifesto: “This manifesto points the way . . . it sets out a broad framework for the recovery of our country, based not on dogma, but on reason, on common sense.”¹⁷

Obviously the phrase “common sense” was a crowd-pleaser, but beyond suggesting something about her populist appeal, it doesn’t tell us much about the specifics. Alone among British prime ministers, Thatcher’s name has become synonymous with an ideology—there is no Churchillism, there is no Attleeism. Thatcherism admits of no easy definition, but certain core principles are clear: She believed in free markets, popular capitalism, property ownership, privatization, monetarism, firm control over public expenditure, low taxation, and individualism. She was an ardent patriot and nationalist. She deplored socialism and considered welfare spending and collective bargaining to be forms of it. She particularly despised powerful trade unions. She was leery of international organizations. She saw nothing to admire in the Soviet Union and much to admire in America.

But there is a distinctly emotional component to Thatcherism as well, one expressed quite well by Ingham’s table-thumping animadversions:

BI: Thatcherism says to hell with all your pesky ideas, this is the way you must run a country! You must run it so you protect the value of people’s money, so that you protect the weak, the disabled, the infirm, and whatever, so that you defend the realm, and then you let people get on with it! And you organize things for their benefit, not for the government’s benefit, or for the benefit of narrow sectional interests! That’s common sense!

Thatcher had been convinced by Joseph that the Conservatives had lost the last election because they had failed to stand their ground. She was equally convinced that she was the only one left in her party who would defend that ground. She stood against Heath for the party leadership in 1975. When she went to Heath’s office to tell him her decision, he did not bother to look up. “You’ll lose,” he said. “Good day to you.”¹⁸

To his astonishment, and to the even greater astonishment of the nation, she won.

CONFIDENTIAL

PAGE 01 LONDON 02415 01 OF 02 161633Z
O R 161602Z FEB 75
FM AM EMBASSY LONDON
TO USMISSION GENEVA IMMEDIATE
SUBJECT: MARGARET THATCHER: SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS

. . . MARGARET THATCHER HAS BLAZED INTO NATIONAL PROMINENCE ALMOST LITERALLY FROM OUT OF NOWHERE. WHEN SHE FIRST INDICATED THAT SHE INTENDED TO STAND AGAINST TED HEATH FOR LEADERSHIP OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY, FEW TOOK HER CHALLENGE SERIOUSLY AND FEWER STILL BELIEVED IT WOULD SUCCEED. SHE HAD NEVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE INNER CIRCLE OF TORY POWER BROKERS, AND NO POLITICIAN IN MODERN TIMES HAS COME TO THE LEADERSHIP OF EITHER MAJOR PARTY WITH SUCH A NARROW RANGE OF PRIOR EXPERIENCE. NOW SUDDENLY, AFTER WHAT HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS HER “DARINGLY SUCCESSFUL COMMANDO RAID ON THE HEIGHTS OF THE TORY PARTY,” SHE HAS BECOME THE FOCUS OF UNUSUALLY INTENSIVE MEDIA AND POPULAR INTEREST . . .

THERE IS GENERAL AGREEMENT AMONG FRIENDS AND CRITICS ALIKE THAT SHE IS AN EFFECTIVE AND FORCEFUL PARLIAMENTARY PERFORMER. SHE HAS A QUICK, IF NOT PROFOUND, MIND, AND WORKS HARD TO MASTER THE MOST COMPLICATED BRIEF. SHE FIGHTS HER CORNER WITH SKILL AND TOUGHNESS, BUT CAN BE FLEXIBLE WHEN PRESSED. IN DEALING WITH THE MEDIA OR WITH SUBORDINATES, SHE TENDS TO BE CRISP AND A TRIFLE PATRONIZING. WITH COLLEAGUES, SHE IS HONEST AND STRAIGHT-FORWARD, IF NOT EXCESSIVELY CONSIDERATE OF THEIR VANITIES.

CIVIL SERVANTS AT THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION FOUND HER AUTOCRATIC. SHE HAS THE COURAGE OF HER CONVICTIONS, AND ONCE SHE HAS REACHED A DECISION TO ACT, IS UNLIKELY TO BE DEFLECTED BY ANY BUT THE MOST PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS.

SELF-CONFIDENT AND SELF-DISCIPLINED, SHE GIVES EVERY PROMISE OF BEING A STRONG LEADER . . .

EVEN BEFORE HER GREAT LEAP UPWARD, MRS. THATCHER HAD BEEN THE PERSONIFICATION OF A BRITISH MIDDLE CLASS DREAM COME TRUE. BORN THE DAUGHTER OF A GROCER, SHE HAD BY DINT OF HER OWN ABILITIES AND APPLICATION WON THROUGH, SECURING SCHOLARSHIPS TO GOOD SCHOOLS, MAKING A SUCCESS OF HER CHOSEN CAREER, AND MARRYING ADVANTAGEOUSLY. IT IS NOT SURPRISING THEN THAT SHE ESPOUSES THE MIDDLE CLASS VALUES OF THRIFT, HARD WORK, AND LAW AND ORDER, THAT SHE BELIEVES IN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE, MAXIMUM FREEDOM FOR MARKET FORCES, AND MINIMAL POWER FOR THE STATE. HERS IS THE GENUINE VOICE OF A BELEAGUERED BOURGEOISIE, ANXIOUS ABOUT ITS ERODING ECONOMIC POWER AND DETERMINED TO ARREST SOCIETY’S SEEMINGLY INEXORABLE TREND TOWARDS COLLECTIVISM. SOMEWHAT UNCHIVALROUSLY, DENIS HEALEY HAS DUBBED HER “LA PASIONARIA OF MIDDLE CLASS PRIVILEGE.”¹⁹ . . .

UNFORTUNATELY FOR HER PROSPECTS OF BECOMING A NATIONAL, AS DISTINCT FROM A PARTY, LEADER, SHE HAS OVER THE YEARS ACQUIRED A DISTINCTIVELY UPPER MIDDLE CLASS PERSONAL IMAGE. HER IMMACULATE GROOMING, HER IMPERIOUS MANNER, HER CONVENTIONAL AND SOMEWHAT FORCED CHARM, AND ABOVE ALL HER PLUMMY VOICE STAMP HER AS THE QUINTESSENTIAL SUBURBAN MATRON, AND FRIGHTFULLY ENGLISH TO BOOT. NONE OF THIS GOES DOWN WELL WITH THE WORKING CLASS OF ENGLAND (ONE-THIRD OF WHICH USED TO VOTE CONSERVATIVE), TO SAY NOTHING OF ALL CLASSES IN THE CELTIC FRINGES OF THIS ISLAND . . .

 

Margaret Thatcher’s bustling, proper, middle-class officiousness prompted astonishing effusions of snobbery among Britain’s elites. When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theater producer Jonathan Millar replied that it was “self-evident”—they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle-class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.” (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)

THESE ARE STILL EARLY DAYS THOUGH . . . THE ODDS ARE AGAINST HER, BUT AFTER HER STUNNING ORGANIZATIONAL COUP D’ÉTAT THIS PAST MONTH, FEW ARE PREPARED TO SAY SHE CAN’T DO IT. ²⁰

Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, succeeded by the new leader of the Labour Party, James Callaghan. As leader of the Opposition, Thatcher immediately began to attract international notice, particularly for her coruscating attack on the Soviet Union, delivered at the Kensington Town Hall:

The Russians are bent on world dominance and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen . . . They put guns before butter while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense—the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms . . . If we cannot draw the lesson . . . then we are destined, in their words, to end up on the scrap heap of history.²¹

This speech led the state-controlled Soviet press to give her the name by which she has since been known: the Iron Lady. It tells you something about the way Britain was perceived at the time that the communist apparatchiks who coined this phrase presumably believed this would be understood in Britain as a hurtful insult, one that would damage her prestige, not enhance it. It also suggests how divorced those apparatchiks were from the sentiments of their own citizens, many of whom from then on worshipped her as primitive man worshipped the sun.

Like the rest of the industrialized world, Britain endured throughout the 1970s the reverberating effects of the 1973 oil price shock. Inflation soared, reaching a peak of 27 percent in 1975. If real wages were diminishing, Britain’s labor leaders concluded, this was more than a hardship for the working man, it was an injustice perpetrated against him by the ruling classes. The remedy, they concluded, was workers’ solidarity and the blunt weapon of industrial action. Labor leaders of greater wisdom, or at least ones in possession of a more sophisticated economic model, might have concluded that strikes and work stoppages were the last thing Britain now needed, and indeed the one thing guaranteed to deal a death blow to an already faltering economy. Wisdom was not their forte.

During the Winter of Discontent, the question raised by Heath—Who rules?—hung over Britain like a cold cloud. That question was understood to be the question, and it was a question to which Britain’s powerful unions had a ready answer: We do. They had, after all, with contemptuous ease brought down the Heath government. The labor barons were persuaded that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it, and they proposed to run it for their benefit, embedding in both law and custom practices that everyone beyond the union halls could see would in the end destroy Britain as a competitive economic power.

When the 1979 general election brought the Conservatives back to power, there was no widespread expectation that Thatcher could change this situation, and there has been no attempt retrospectively to suggest that there was. Her election, according to her friends and enemies alike, was not personal: It was a rebuke to the Labour Party and the embarrassing diminishment of Britain over which it had presided.

BI: She won by a contempt, really, for the Labour Party’s inability to cope with the trade unions. But no great expectation that she would be any better at it. They felt she ought to have a chance. I think quite a lot of people thought that she couldn’t do any worse than the men . . .

CB: How would you describe the economic climate, the moral climate in Britain back then?

BI: Let me try to make the point this way. Just as I believe people in this country, the most stupid people in our country, most of whom can be found in our government, do not understand the nature of the trauma that hit the United States with 9/11, so the United States—and people in this country have forgotten—so people in the United States will have no understanding, really, of the dire nature that British society had reached by 1979. It wasn’t quite so bad that people felt that society was breaking down, but it was bad enough for people to wonder whether they would go into work that day, whether they would get into work that day, whether their rubbish would be cleared, where the next strike—railway or whatever—would happen. And it was a poor society. I’ve never been as poor in my adult life as I was in the mid ’70s. Devaluation [of the currency] and all that kind of thing. I felt, even though I was a civil servant, I felt impoverished. Because of the shabbiness. The way Britain had become, it felt totally shabby. In the hands of a many-headed dictator called—

CB: What did “shabby” look like?

BI: It was a fairly primitive society. People living in council houses, under the thumb of local authorities, large areas of working-class houses that had long since seen their best . . . It was shabby.

Britain was shabby, I can testify to this. In fact, I moved to Britain in 1988, at the tail end of the Thatcher era, and it was still shabby. Before this, I had been working in Paris as a fille au pair. The difference between Paris and London—even after nearly ten years of Thatcher—was shocking. Paris was gay, bright, renovated; London was dreary and sullen. Throughout Britain, people looked ragged and worn-down. The food was inedible. Standards of customer service were appalling. Nearly twenty years later, the transformation of Britain is undeniable. London is now pristine and gleaming, packed with superb restaurants, purveyors of flat-screen televisions and organic linens, upscale aromatherapists. There has been a transformation in the appearance of the British people: They look healthier; they have better skin and glossier hair; they are well-dressed. To take the Eurostar from London to Paris is now to have precisely the opposite reaction from the one I had two decades ago. Getting off the train, one notes immediately that by comparison with London, Paris is shabby.

Prior to the 1979 election, the British ambassador to Paris, Nicholas Henderson, sent a dispatch to the Foreign Office. It was leaked several weeks later to the press during the general election campaign and immediately became an iconic document, a detailed and devastating dissection of British shabbiness and all that it entailed.

“I myself,” he wrote,

was able to observe Churchill, Attlee and Bevin dealing on equal terms with Stalin and Truman at the Potsdam Conference when no German or Frenchman was present . . . in the mid ’50s we were still the strongest European power, economically and militarily . . . It is our decline since then in relation to our European partners that has been so marked, so that today we are not only no longer a world power, we are not even in the first rank as a European one . . .

Indeed in France we have come nowadays to be associated with malaise as closely as in the old days we were associated with success.²²

Contemporary readers of this document will be struck by another remark. “Apologists,” wrote Henderson, “. . . will argue that the British way of life, with ingenuity and application devoted to leisure rather than work, is superior to that elsewhere and in any case what people want.” If that argument sounds familiar, it should: It is what is now said about France.

There is a point that should be emphasized here. In terms of key economic indicators, Britain was not declining in absolute terms; in fact, the economy had grown at a slow but steady average of 2 to 3 percent per annum since the end of the Second World War. What Ingham and Henderson are lamenting is Britain’s relative decline. Once the world’s foremost power, it had now been outpaced by Germany.

And why? This is a key question. One hypothesis is that the economic policies Britain pursued after the Second World War destroyed Britain’s natural genius for greatness. A second is that Britain simply followed a natural economic pattern: It experienced rapid growth at the onset of industrialization, but slower growth thereafter. If Germany was, in the 1970s, growing faster than Britain, this was because Germany had begun the process of industrialization later than Britain. More to the point, having been leveled in the Second World War, Germany was starting from zero, which severely skews any statistical analysis.

I mention this argument to Sir Bernard, who agrees that yes, Britain’s decline was only a relative decline. But his reply—and again, this may be taken as the official Thatcherite view—was that even this relative decline needn’t have occurred.

BI: The big difference was, after the war, the Germans let rip, and we didn’t. I mean, we had controls, we had—we were a semi-socialist society. Not with the apparatus of the Soviet Union or anything like that, but we were a semi-socialist society with all kinds of restrictions and controls that held back enterprise. Whereas they let it go. Much quicker. I mean, I remember that during the ’50s—Why don’t they have rationing, and why do we? I mean, we won the bloody war!

We won the bloody war. To understand Thatcherism, start with this sentiment. We won the bloody war, and we used to run the world. Now we have rubbish and dead bodies piled on our streets, and compared to German cities, gleaming and rebuilt with Marshall Aid (never mind that the trees in those cities are exactly the same height, one of the most chilling sights in the world, when you consider what it means), we look shabby.

This sense of humiliation was Thatcher’s fuel.

At the age of fifty-three, Margaret Thatcher became the first female prime minister in the history of Britain. At the age of fifty-four, she became the most unpopular prime minister in the history of Britain. By no standards could her first years in office be termed a success. Zealously embracing the monetarist prescription, her government attempted to control inflation by raising interest rates. To her dismay, inflation rose, and unemployment quickly doubled.

In 1980, at the Conservative Party conference, Thatcher made one of her most famous speeches. This would not be Heath redux. “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase—the U-turn, I have only one thing to say. You turn if you want to—”

Dramatic pause.

“The Lady’s not for turning!”²³

A punch line perfectly executed. A roaring crowd. The words came from the title of Christopher Fry’s play The Lady’s Not for Burning, and even those who did not understand the reference understood the drama.

Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Britain was now in a severe recession, with unemployment at its highest rate since the Second World War. According to Keynesian orthodoxy, the government should have been stimulating demand, even if this created inflation. Instead, it continued to attempt to curb inflation by controlling the money supply. Thatcher’s chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, unveiled another counter-Keynesian budget, raising taxes. Keynesian economists throughout Britain were aghast; 364 of them sent an open letter to the Times arguing that this policy would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.” Thatcher ignored them. She purged her cabinet of those who agreed with them. In this respect, she had not been kidding; there was no turning.

But on the other critical battlefront, she turned straightaway. Faced with the threat of a miners’ strike and unprepared for it, she capitulated immediately to the National Union of Mineworkers.

BI: You can imagine her, how devastated she was . . . Nothing had been prepared! Now—

CB: She was devastated?

BI: Yeah.

CB: What did she say?

BI: Well, they’d never prepared anything!

CB: Did she say, “I am devastated,” or are you inferring from something she—

BI: No, no, I don’t remember her saying, “I’m devastated,” but I do remember her saying, “No preparations have been made, what on earth is going on?” . . . When I say she was devastated, I think she was mortified, certainly—

CB: Well, it really required years of preparation, how could she have been—

BI: Two years, they’d had two years by then. But what does that tell you? It tells you that there was a palsy of will in the government machine . . . It was like a rabbit in the headlights! They knew trouble was there, but they thought they had to find a way of living with it, rather than beating it.

Ingham is arguing—as he would—that the failure to prepare for this absolutely predictable challenge wasn’t Thatcher’s fault. It was the fault of the “government machine.” But Thatcher was the head of the government, so this is an impossible distinction to sustain. The failure to prepare was Thatcher’s failure and was widely understood to be so.

Thus the achievements of the first years of Thatcherism: Her economic policy was ostensibly a disaster, and far from taming the unions, she had proved herself, as the union leaders claimed, a bitch, to be sure, but their bitch. Had her time in power ended here, she would have been noted by history as a footnote and a minor curiosity.

By 1982, unemployment had reached 3.6 million—a conservative estimate, in both senses of the word, since the government kept finding new ways to define unemployment to make this statistic come out lower. Heath had caved in and reversed his policies when unemployment reached one million. Inflation was beginning slowly to drop, but British manufacturing had shrunk by a quarter. Rioters took to the streets; British cities burned. No one believed Thatcher would survive, and indeed she might not have survived, had she not been blessed by extraordinary luck—as so often she was.

That luck came in two forms: the utter disarray of the Labour Party, riven by factional infighting, and the fecklessness of the leader of the Argentine military junta, Leopoldo Galtieri, who chose this moment to seize the Falkland Islands. Thatcher dispatched a naval task force to recapture them, winning a spectacular military victory. The Labour Party fragmented, its members at each other’s throats. Thatcher won the 1983 general election in a landslide.

It was now that the Thatcher revolution really began. Britain’s economy began not only to recover but to grow. The Tories introduced legislation to curb the power of trade unions and stockpiled coal, preparing to withstand a miners’ strike. The government began selling off nationalized industries and public utilities at a brisk clip, and continued selling state-owned council houses to their tenants, an enormously popular policy.²⁴ With Thatcher’s support, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative and stationed cruise missiles on British soil.

In 1984 came the defining moment of Thatcher’s tenure: the battle for the coal mines. The story of the miners’ strike is so gripping it might be fiction, but it is entirely true. It involves two great personalities: Thatcher herself, and Arthur Scargill, coal miner and communist, one of the most powerful orators in the annals of the Left. It is a story of two ways of looking at the world, and the contest that would determine whether Britain would be a capitalist society or a socialist one.

Previous mining strikes had been over in a matter of weeks. Not this one. Over the course of a year, as all of Britain watched, horrified, waiting to see who would break first, Thatcher proceeded to crush her enemies with a calculating, ruthless violence that stunned the British public. Neither labor nor the unions ever recovered. For a brief moment of clarity, power politics stood revealed in all its stark drama. The unions had made a bid for power. They lost. They were doomed. No longer was there any doubt what kind of country Britain would be. No longer was there any doubt who ruled.

In late 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev visited Britain. Thatcher declared him a man she could do business with. One year later, the West did business with him at the Reykjavik summit, and the year following, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. In 1987, Thatcher won a third term in office, becoming the only prime minister in the twentieth century to serve three consecutive terms.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Just as communism’s prehensile grip on power began to loosen, so did Thatcher’s. The introduction of the poll tax—a uniform, fixed charge for community services—was intended to reduce the hold of the Labour Party on local councils by exposing its profligacy, but instead sparked protests and riots. Inflation began again to rise. Her cabinet fractured over the terms of Britain’s entry into Europe.

In 1990, her longest-serving minister, Geoffrey Howe, resigned. Thatcher was challenged for the Conservative Party leadership by her former defense minister, Michael Heseltine, who gained sufficient votes in the first round of balloting to force a second one. Persuaded by her cabinet colleagues that she had lost the support of her party and could not win, she resigned.

She was never defeated at the polls.

Leave aside for the moment the question of credit for the vibrant state of Britain’s economy now—is it the consequence of Thatcher’s policies, or New Labour’s, or both, or neither? We will come back to that. Let us instead ask what seems to me the obvious question to ask of the man who managed Thatcher’s image. Given that the economy is now so vibrant, why is Thatcher still so often reviled in Britain? For if it is often said that the American people would elect her in a heartbeat, this is not so in the country she ran. Thatcher’s name to this day inspires in a remarkable number of her countrymen profound vitriol, even among people who have clearly been the beneficiaries of her policies. What was it about her that so rubbed people the wrong way?

Needless to say, Ingham does not believe the animus to be fair.

BI: First of all, I don’t think people really understand the viciousness of the Left in this country. Okay, you may say that the Left is infinitely more vicious in France, where they riot at the drop of a hat and all that, but this lot are really nasty.

CB: What do you think is the source of that viciousness?

BI: Well, I think, because we are a fairly intemperate lot. The British pride themselves on being a wonderfully even-tempered and decent people, but once they embrace a doctrine, they can become quite, quite extreme. And the Left, they’re a nasty bunch. And they’re a nasty, scheming bunch, too . . . Then there was the affronted self-regard—you remember, do you, the 364 economists who wrote to the Times?

CB: In 1981, yes—

BI: Good. Well, they don’t like being proven wrong. And they were proved comprehensively wrong!

In one sense, Ingham has a point. Awkwardly for the signatories, immediately after the publication of their letter, Britain’s economy entered an uninterrupted eight-year period of growth. Yet it is also true that the industrial base of the economy was not only eroded, as they had predicted, but gutted. The growth rate reflected the expansion of the services sector; the manufacturing sector contracted sharply in those early years and never recovered. The prediction that her policies would threaten social stability was borne out: Britain was taken to the brink of civil war during the miners’ strike. I note what Ingham said not because it is the unalloyed truth, but because it nonetheless contains an important insight about the nature of Thatcherism and the grievances of her critics.

BI: The British establishment was in the grip of a sort of pale-pink socialism. There are still a lot of them around now who believe, who have this sort of naive, this romantic view of the working classes—from which I come! I mean, I said, to Eric Morley, “What’s he like, Tony Benn?” “Oh!” he said. “The only thing you need to know about Wedgie is that he thinks the sun shines out of the working classes—!” And then he said to me, “And you and I know better, don’t we?” It’s this romantic notion of—I mean, it’s horridly condescending.

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.

CB: Where does this romantic notion come from? What are the origins of that?

BI: Oh, I would have thought the origins are in the Fabians, you know, that we must do good. We know how to do good, and we have the money to do good, and we have the security and we will do good. And that inevitably became, and you will be done good to!

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.

BI: It is an attitude of mind toward ordinary people that they are not capable of leading their lives without direction. And Mrs. Thatcher was essentially saying, “Oh yes they are, let’s set them free.” And of course when they were set free, quite a lot of them didn’t do well—of course they didn’t. But quite a lot of them prospered enormously, and have never looked back since they got their hands on their council houses! . . . But she really challenged notions—well, she challenged notions of class!

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.

BI: So, does that explain British society?

CB: Well . . . yes and no.

BI: Well, tell me where you are desperately uninformed. What do you think is missing?

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.