There Is No Alternative

This image of Thatcher, visiting the White House in 1979, conveys the old-fashioned movie-star glamour she could project when it suited her purposes. If you did not know this was the new prime minister of Britain, you could easily imagine this woman sweeping regally into the Kodak Theater to collect an Oscar for lifetime achievement.

“Did you like being around that?” The man before me is sedate, his hands folded primly in his lap. It is hard to imagine that a boiling environment would be to his taste.

“Well, it was pretty invigorating, but really tiring.”

I’ll bet.

I ask him to tell me more about the way Margaret Thatcher looked to him, back in those early days. “Her posture was always upright,” he says. “She was very, very stiff-backed and upright, and she was always very tidy as well. A lot of British politicians are very sloppy, in their dress and so on—I don’t want to actually name any names or be discourteous, but you can probably think of quite several, female as well as male. But she was always meticulous in her dress, and perhaps some of her earlier styles look a bit fussy now, but once she got into the power-suit dressing it was all part of it. She was really—you’ve got to think in terms of Margaret Thatcher Productions, almost, I mean there were the policies and the rhetoric, but there was also the hair, the dress, the lighting, and everything. She could have tremendous dramatic effect on the platform, whether at a party conference speech or a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. It was all packaged. It was almost like a great diva, giving a performance.”

He is right. Margaret Thatcher often seemed like an exceptionally gifted actress playing the role of Margaret Thatcher. On television, she fills the screen. The eye is ineluctably drawn to her, so that everything and everyone else in the frame is dwarfed by comparison. Hollywood executives call this quality It. Marlon Brando had It, and so did Marilyn Monroe. But neither of them had nuclear weapons.

Let’s look at one of those Margaret Thatcher Productions in slow-motion. Part of it is on YouTube, in a clip titled “Margaret Thatcher Talking about Sinking the Belgrano.”⁵⁴ During the Falklands War, Britain declared a two-hundred-mile exclusion zone around the islands, warning that any Argentine ship within the zone was subject to destruction. The Argentine cruiser Belgrano was outside this zone, sailing away from the islands. Thatcher or-dered it sunk nonetheless. The attack killed 323 Argentine sailors. An outcry over the carnage ensued, in Britain and abroad; some charged that this was a war crime. Whatever you may think about the sinking of the Belgrano, do note this: The Argentine navy thereafter refused to leave port.

Here is Thatcher, responding to critics who have charged her with obfuscating the circumstances leading to the decision to sink the Belgrano. She is in the television studio with interviewer David Frost, an ordinarily articulate man who is not known for backing away from power but who in her presence appears oddly goofy. Her hair is sprayed into a stiff golden helmet; not a strand is out of place. Her rouge is flawless. Pale lipstick highlights a mouth that on another face might be described as sensuous. She is wearing pearl earrings; the broach on the lapel of her stern navy suit complements her blouse. The effect, as Powell said, is immaculately tidy.

David Frost: On that day, when the Government said it changed direction many times, it only changed direction once to go back home and a 10-degree difference to get closer to Argentina—

Prime Minister: A ship is torpedoed on the basis that if wherever she is she can get back to sink your ships in reasonable time, you do not just discover ships on the high seas and keep track of them the entire time. You can lose them. You can lose them. I would far rather have been under the attack I was for the Belgrano than under the attack I might have been under for putting the Hermes or Invincible in danger, and if ever you think that governments have to reveal every single thing about ships’ movements, we do not! And if I were tackling—

DF: No, but I mean, the reason people get—

Prime Minister:—in charge of a war again, I would take the same decision again . . . Do you think, Mr. Frost, that I spend my days prowling round the pigeonholes of the Ministry of Defense to look at the chart of each and every ship? If you do you must be bonkers!

DF: No! Come back to the—

Prime Minister: Do you think I keep in my head—

DF:—when you said to Mrs. Gould⁵⁵—when you said to Mrs. Gould on the election program before the election in ’83 that it was not sailing away from the Falklands, you had known from November ’82 that it was!

Prime Minister: What I said to Mrs. Gould was, “If you think that I know in detail the passage of every blessed ship I cannot think what you think the Prime Minister’s job is!”⁵⁶

You may tune in on YouTube to see the rest. Study the voice: Like a trained stage actress, she projects from the chest and uses the full range of her vocal register. Her body remains still; she does not fidget or shift or even gesture. Note the varied rhythm of her speech—one moment slow and deliberate, the next insistent and percussive. “What I know, Mr. Frost,” she says—and she pronounces his name, Mr. Frost, as if a Mr. Frost is some thoroughly disgusting species of bug—“is that the ministers have given the information to the House of Commons. They said that one thing was not correct. I was the first to say, ‘Right, give the correct information .’ And the correct, and deadly accurate information was given.” The word “deadly” flows easily from her tongue. She is leaning forward, intense, alert. Her eyes are blazing. You are looking at a woman who has given the order to kill 323 young Argentine men, and her glowing complexion suggests that this has not troubled her sleep one bit. Indeed, she looks as if she has had an exceptionally good night’s rest.

“But I do not spend my days,” she continues—in response to a question he has not asked—“prowling around the pigeonholes of the Ministry of Defense looking at the precise course of action.” She says I as if the I in question is something magnificent, and the very hint that such a vital magnificence—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the human embodiment of the British people and their destiny!—would do something as lowly as prowl (never mind that Mr. Frost never said this) is contemptible. There is now something like a bat squeak from Mr. Frost. “One moment!” she pronounces, lifting an imperious finger. “One moment!”

Mr. Frost tries haplessly to get a word in, fumbling with his papers. “Woodrow Wyatt says you only respect people who—”⁵⁷

“One moment,” she demands.

“Yes,” he says meekly and falls silent. Her voice is lower now, and all the more menacing for it. Given her expression you would not be entirely surprised to see laser beams shoot from her eyes and vaporize this disgusting Mr. Frost, bringing the death toll to a salutary 324. “That ship”—she says this slowly, her mouth narrow, her voice full of controlled fury and contempt—“was a danger to our boys.”

Our boys: These are in fact men she is talking about, every last one of them over the age of majority and armed with fearsome weapons, and the use of the word “boys” sounds at once fiercely maternal—a tiger protecting her cubs—and intensely patronizing. Those boys are our heroes, as all right-thinking men and women know, and you, Mr. Frost, are not fit to shine their shoes. But they are still boys, just as you, Mr. Frost, are a silly stripling. The lot of you—boys. But you are my boys, and that is why despite your childish foolishness, I shall protect you and set you on the right course. “That’s why that ship was sunk,” she says. “I know it was right to sink her.” A pause. Mr. Frost has gone mute. “And I would do . . . the same . . . again.”

Fade to black.

She did not rehearse this speech; there was no speechwriter or teleprompter; it was live and impromptu. The performance is a miracle of menace, rhythm, dramatic timing. It is impossible to watch without thinking that you would not trade places with the miserable Mr. Frost for all the world.

I now take the train from London to Oxford, where I have an appointment to speak with the Master of Balliol College, Andrew Graham, about his memories of Margaret Thatcher. The Master is a man of the Left. From 1966 to 1969, he was an influential economic advisor to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson; he worked again for Wilson between 1974 and 1976 at the policy unit attached to 10 Downing Street. In the early 1990s, he advised the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith. After Smith’s death, he fell out spectacularly with the New Labourites: You may all be Thatcherites now, he told them, but count me out.

I am seeing him because I want the other side of the story. I have met a series of Thatcher’s cabinet ministers and her most ardent defenders. Now I want to hear the best and most serious case against Thatcher’s economic policies (which we will not get from New Labour, because they are all Thatcherites now). He will not disappoint, but we will come back to that later.

I am early for my appointment, so I stroll slowly through the streets of Oxford. Oxford is two cities, sharply divided. The poets ignore the outskirts of the city—the menacing townie pubs with their tattooed patrons, places students know better than to enter, the seedy bedsits over the Cowley Road where the stairwells smell of urine and turmeric, the rows of kebab vans, all named Ali’s, parked outside those stairwells and reeking of ancient mutton. The poets write about the city center—a rook-racked, river-rounded city of dreaming spires, they call it, and they are right.

The Master of Balliol was my economics tutor when I was an undergraduate, many years ago. I had last seen him when I was in my early twenties. I was very fond of him—he was warm, lively, unstuffy, a wonderful teacher. I had feared as I walked to our meeting that I would find him much older and that this would remind me that I too am much older, but to my delight he is unchanged.

He’s running a few minutes late. He darts through the sitting room in the Master’s lodge, spots me, beams broadly in welcome, then dashes up the staircase. “I’ll just be another minute, Claire. I’m sitting for my portrait!” How lively and spry he looks, I think! Could it be that in the portrait he is stooped and wrinkled?

When he returns he escorts me to his office, with its high ceilings and heavy brocaded curtains framing a picture window overlooking Broad Street. Haphazard stacks of papers cover the floor, the tables, the chairs. We chat for a while about economics, then we turn to the subject of Thatcher’s political presence. We are trying to put our finger on what it was about her that kept the electorate coming back for more and more and more, despite—in his view, of course—her disastrously misguided policies. What was the source of her charisma, I wonder aloud?

“Well,” he says, “I didn’t think this, I never felt it, but—quite a lot of people, some men—found her quite—sexy!”

“Mmmm,” I say. “I’ve heard this. Who was it, Mitterrand, who called her Brigitte Bardot with Caligula’s eyes?”

“Exactly! And I think some of it was the sex that goes with power, and I, you know, I just can’t get on that wavelength. I won’t say I don’t find power interesting, I do, but I just can’t get there with Mrs. Thatcher at all, I can’t even get to square one! But I’ve heard it from people I was surprised by.”

“Perhaps you’d care to say who?”

He won’t name names. “I mean, a colleague of mine in Balliol, who is now dead, was a professor of physics, went along to a seminar in All Souls, incredibly impressed by her, just sort of swept off his feet by how articulate and how clear she was, and by her general demeanor um—this, she had—I wouldn’t say, because I never felt it—she had, somewhere in there—there is something more interesting than just a domineering personality. There is a degree of magnetism that somehow all big leaders have. I didn’t see it, couldn’t remotely—”

Thatcher addressing a conference on foreign policy in London, in 1989. “It was as if there was a sort of electric glow about her,” recalls the conservative MP David Ames. “She seemed to overshadow everyone.” Graham Wiltshire, who took this photograph, remembered that “the effect she had on these events was almost hypnotic.” (Courtesy of Graham Wiltshire)

I get it, I get it. He wasn’t attracted to Margaret Thatcher, no how, no way. I do note that it wasn’t me who suggested he might be. “I’ve seen it,” I say. “And I’m still trying to figure out how to describe what it was that I see—I mean, sex appeal is one aspect of it, but it’s not just that, it’s—it is an utter confidence which is unbelievably rare in women.”

“Yeah, I mean, going back to what—I mean—I’m not a pacifist, I think war is sometimes essential, but I wasn’t—you know, most people in the UK were sort of gung-ho about the Falklands War, I thought it was absolutely unnecessary, but I think she deserves enormous credit for that. I mean, one Exocet on one of those destroyers and the whole thing would have been a completely different story. Just a completely different story.”

In fact, the HMS Sheffield did take a direct hit from an Exocet missile. It was blasted apart. This did not for a moment cool the prime minister’s ardor. But I agree with the point he is expressing. I have thought of it often, what it must have felt like to be her at that moment, of the enormous risks she took. The outcome was not at all guaranteed. “So,” the Master wonders aloud, “is that foolhardiness or is it courage?”

“In terms of psychological typing,” I say, “probably it would be described as a touch of narcissism—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he agrees, nodding.

“And perhaps a bit of hypomania, as well—”

“Yeah, but—” He pauses. “It’s also a kind of guts.”

Armchair diagnosis can be taken only so far, but the words “narcissism” and “hypomania”—and “guts,” for that matter—do fit her uncannily well. Take the Mayo Clinic’s description of the narcissistic personality style, for example:

People who have a narcissistic personality style . . . are generally psychologically healthy, but may at times be arrogant, proud, shrewd, confident, self-centered and determined to be at the top. They do not, however, have an unrealistic image of their skills and worth and are not dependent on praise to sustain a healthy self-esteem. You may find these individuals unpleasant or overbearing in certain social, professional or interpersonal encounters . . . ⁵⁸

Check, check, check. And hypomania? Without a doubt:

Some traits of hypomania: . . . filled with energy . . . flooded with ideas . . . driven, restless, and unable to keep still . . . often works on little sleep . . . feels brilliant, special, chosen, perhaps even destined to change the world . . . is a risk taker . . . ⁵⁹

As for “guts,” I trust no definition is needed.

“I do think,” I say to the Master, “that men tend to be more certain in their convictions. This tends to be a male trait. Which is one reason why Thatcher is so unique.”

He nods. “Ah, she’s interesting, yes.”

“I mean, you keep seeing comparisons of, say, Ségolène Royal with Thatcher, and that’s absurd, they’ve got nothing at all in common, they’re a completely different species. And the comparisons between Hillary Clinton and Thatcher seem to me not only from a policy point of view, but a personality point of view, completely ridiculous. Hillary conveys none of that absolute, rock-solid authority , which I think was the source of Thatcher’s charisma—”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Thatcher’s wasn’t a Bill Clinton kind of charisma at all.” I met Bill Clinton once at a reception held for him at Oxford—his alma mater—during the first years of his presidency. His charisma was just as it is always described. He shook my hand and did that thing for which he’s famous: one hand holding mine, the other on my elbow, looking deeply into my eyes, and for one moment, just that moment, the clicking cameras stopped, the crowds faded to a blur, and I knew that the leader of the Free World was more interested in me, more interested in what I thought and felt, than anyone—including my own mother—had ever been before. His eyes told me clearly that if only this annoying Secret Service detail would stop hurrying him along, we would just talk and talk and talk, he and I; I would tell him about my thoughts about health care, and Social Security, and . . .

“No. Not remotely,” agrees the Master.

“It’s the charisma of someone who is absolutely certain she is right—”

“And with some of us, drives us completely bonkers, because we think she’s so wrong!”

“I think that’s the source of the passionate emotions about her,” I agree. Bernard Ingham attributes it to the sheer viciousness of the Left, but the Master of Balliol is anything but a vicious man. Thatcher’s brand of certainty was fascinating and maddening in equal measure, and if you happened to think her wrong, it was enough to make you bonkers. “So there’s that utter certainty in herself,” I continue, “and there was something sexy about her, in a traditional way, especially as a young woman—she was not a raving beauty, but she was attractive—”

“Yes, yes.”

“But also a maternal archetype—she reminded people of their mothers or their schoolteachers—”

“Yeah, but, you know, I’ve never had that, you know, doesn’t remotely work at all for me, not at all, so you’d have to find—but you know, some people find that very—attractive!”

Margaret and Denis Thatcher stand outside No. 10 Downing Street directly after her 1979 election victory. Two days later, she arrived to address a meeting of Conservative backbench MPs. “She was flanked only by the all-male officers of the committee,” recalls Geoffrey Howe. “Suddenly she looked very beautiful—and very frail, as the half-dozen knights of the shires towered over her. It was a moving, almost feudal occasion. Tears came to my eyes . . . this overwhelmingly male gathering dedicated themselves enthusiastically to the service of this remarkable woman.” (Courtesy of Graham Wiltshire)

Back to London. “She was always very conscious of being a woman,” says Charles Powell. “This was a tremendous part of her political personality, and she played it for what it was worth—which was a lot. Here was the first woman leader of Britain, first woman head of government in Europe, a whole host of things, and she took advantage of that, and it was very sensible to do that—after all there were enough strikes against her as a woman to justify making the most of the advantages of it.”

There is a framed photograph of Thatcher in her prime right above his chair. Flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked, and power-suited, she is staring at me intently. It is one of those curious portraits in which the subject’s eyes seem to follow you no matter where you move. It reminds me of a line from her autobiography:

I took a close interest in the physical as well as the diplomatic preparations for our big summits. For example, I had earlier had the swivel chairs around the big conference table at the “QE II” replaced by light wooden ones: I always thought there was something to be said for looking at your opposite number in the eye without his being able to swivel sideways to escape.⁶⁰

I think momentarily of the campaign for the French presidency and of Nicolas Sarkozy’s final debate with the lustrously beautiful Ségolène Royal. Royal’s handlers had presumably urged her to try to make Sarkozy lose his famously volatile temper, which was—supposedly—his great electoral liability. Sarkozy was too sly to fall for it. The more she tried to provoke him, the more unctuously polite he became, until finally the frustrated Royal became nearly hysterical with rage. At this point Sarkozy contemplated her with infinite solicitude and told her patiently that Madame, you lose your temper too easily, and a presidential figure must learn to be calm. Royal was left spluttering, on the verge of tears. Everyone who watched this sensed what Sarkozy managed to insinuate while of course never saying it outright: How extremely attractive you are, ma puce. It is a pity that you suffer so from your menopausal hormones. That was the end of poor Ségo. “How exactly did Thatcher manage to use her femininity without having it turned against her?” I ask Powell.

“Well, for one thing, she was extremely shrewd. She could read the character of the English public schoolboys who made up the majority of her cabinet, and she knew they’d been brought up to be polite to women, also to, you know, treat them in a sort of patronizing way, and she would rock them to their foundations by screeching at them and yelling at them and arguing with them and generally treating them very badly in order to get her way. And she knew they would not easily fight back.”

A screeching, yelling, arguing woman—oh! It is every man’s nightmare. Yet her ability to be an utter harridan was somehow one of her great strengths, and only one of her many distaff weapons. “Most of them would become defensive,” Powell recalls, “Geoffrey Howe above all, you know, and just withdraw into their shells, and not really punch back, and then they’d go off and cry and complain and moan to the deputy prime minister, Lord Whitelaw, about how awful she was . . . ”

It was Geoffrey Howe, her longest-serving and longest-suffering cabinet minister, who ultimately put the knife in her back. It is a matter of near-universal consensus that in a court of law he would be acquitted for this crime on a battered-minister defense.

Neil Kinnock, the leader of the Labour Party for the better part of the Thatcher epoch, was unhinged, utterly discombobulated by the simple fact that his opponent was a woman.⁶¹ He had no idea how to deal with this.

Kinnock happens to be a man of spellbinding charm. I was astonished to discover this, for this is not his reputation. He was mocked as “the Welsh windbag” in the press, continually derided as a weak and ineffectual debater in the House of Commons. But when I spoke to him he was superbly articulate, and his mellifluous baritone voice, with his melodic Welsh accent, made me want to keep him on the phone for hours. I would gladly have spoken to him about anything—philately, maritime law, animal husbandry—just to keep listening to him.

The odd thing about him is that his face doesn’t match his voice. Had I been given the chance to vote for him while speaking to him on the phone, I would have pulled the crypto-communist lever. His voice was just that charming, just that authoritative. After hanging up I looked again at photos of him. His head is a bit pigeon-like, with a beaky nose and a glabrous skull skirted by thin wisps of pumpkin-orange hair. There is something smirky and schoolboyish about his expression. That beautiful baritone voice is the voice of a leader, but that face? No, not quite. Would history have been different, I wonder, if Kinnock had had a full head of regal silver hair, a square jaw, and a Roman nose?

History is what history was, and the record shows that Kinnock was not much of a match for Thatcher. “Even in Margaret Thatcher’s weak moments,” recalls Charles Powell, “he was quite unable to capitalize; he just didn’t have the ability. He was absolutely petrified of her, too, because she destroyed him every week in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Powell is of course biased, as he freely admits, but Kinnock’s own account is not all that different.

I ask Kinnock what it was it like to square off against Thatcher during Prime Minister’s Questions. “Well,” he says, “the immediate problem I had—I had two immediate problems. One was, she’s a woman seventeen years older than myself. And there were punches I could throw against, say, John Major, who’s a man of my age, that I just couldn’t throw against a woman seventeen years older.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you know, there’s a form of language that—you know, I could accuse Major of hypocrisy, of evasion—”

I’m puzzled. If you consult the parliamentary record, you will find no shortage of examples of Kinnock accusing the prime minister of hypocrisy and evasion.

Mr. Kinnock: Is she innumerate, or simply mendacious?⁶² . . . Mr. Speaker: Order! Mr. Kinnock: Is she an Iron Lady or is she a closet flexi-toy?⁶³ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Will the Prime Minister then answer the question, which she evaded yesterday? ⁶⁴ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Will she admit that last night she was up to her usual tricks of fabrication?⁶⁵ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Is it the case . . . that her cynicism and vindictiveness have overwhelmed all sense of duty?⁶⁶ . . . Mr. Kinnock: What is she trying to evade now?⁶⁷ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Is it not a fact that the Prime Minister’s selfish pride has reached such depths as to require her to threaten the careers of loyal civil servants in order to impose her selfish will?⁶⁸ . . . Mr. Kinnock: The Prime Minister’s answer will be regarded both inside and outside the House as complete humbug—⁶⁹ Mr. Kinnock: The Prime Minister’s refusal to give a straight answer to a straight question will be noted by the whole country—⁷⁰ . . . Mr. Speaker: Order! Order! . . . Mr. Kinnock: Why does not the Prime Minister, just for once, answer the question on the subject raised?⁷¹ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Is the right hon. Lady copping out on this one again?⁷² . . . Mr. Kinnock: Why will the right hon. Lady not answer straight questions on these matters? Why is she still such a twister?⁷³ . . . Mr. Kinnock: Frankly, I do not believe the right hon. Lady—Hon. Members: Withdraw! . . . Mr. Speaker: Order! The right hon. Gentleman is in order!⁷⁴

“Well,” I say, “you did use some pretty strong language with her.”

“Yeah, sure, but Christ, nothing like that. Nothing like I could use. You know. So, I’m not complaining about that. That’s the way I was brought up, and, the fact is, it wasn’t my instinct to be vile to a lady who was seventeen years older. Secondly, in any case, the public would see fellows my age standing toe-to-toe and knocking the hell out of each other and think, ‘Well, that’s what happens,’ but if I did it to a woman, a whole segment of society, for understandable reasons, would say, ‘That’s so disrespectful. That wasn’t political antagonism, that was disrespect.’ And so, both because it was my instinct and because of political reality—”

I interrupt: “You say you really felt put at a disadvantage by her femininity, and yet she was willing to use that when it—”

“True. Yeah, yeah, yes.”

“Let’s talk about the kind of femininity that she used. I keep hearing various accounts of this.”

“Yes—”

“You know, that she was fully capable of flirting and flattering to get her way. Did you see that in action?”

“Um.” He manages to convey an arctic tundra of distaste in that syllable. “I saw her doing it with others.” He snorts. “Not my type o’ lady.”

Kinnock remembers her trying it on him, though, in meetings about Northern Ireland. “You were meeting with her one-on-one?” I ask.

“Yeah, well, there would be some civil servants. Maybe a soldier there, or a security expert. And if she had some difficult requirement, some way where she really wanted cooperation, and they thought I might have interpreted it as a political step too far—I never did—she’d take her shoes off, and sort of curl her legs under her on an easy chair, and offer me whiskey. And I used to think, ‘This is bloody pathetic.’ I mean, here’s a woman in her sixties. I mean, I know why she did it—because it worked with other people, you see—”⁷⁵

“That’s the odd thing,” I break in. “I’ve spoken now to a number of people, a number of men, all said, ‘Other men found her attractive.’ But not one will admit, ‘I found her attractive.’ So who was it who found her attractive?”

“Well, you know, there are people who wrote about it, you know—Mitterrand.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “And Alan Clark. Yeah.” (“But goodness,” wrote Clark, “she is so beautiful; made up to the nines . . . quite bewitching, as Eva Perón must have been. I could not take my eyes off of her and after a bit she, quite properly, wouldn’t look me in the face.”⁷⁶) Of course, there is no sexual desire to which Alan Clark wouldn’t have admitted. This was the man who in his diaries—not published posthumously, but while he was still alive and married—describes with priceless gusto bedding a South African judge’s wife and her two daughters. At the same time.

“Well,” Kinnock says, “a couple of people have written about it. And, you know, I saw her being what I suppose you’d call coquettish to other people at receptions and whatnot.”

“It’s not just sexiness,” I say. “It was also the maternal archetype. I keep getting the sense that people responded to her as a stern mother, a stern schoolmistress—”

The matron. We should linger for a moment on this image; the full dimensions of it may be obscure to the American reader. Men of Margaret Thatcher’s generation who attended the public schools were apt to have grown up under the matron’s influence. George Orwell described the matron thus in Such, Such Were the Joys:

I think it would be true to say that every boy in the school hated and feared her. Yet we all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the top layer of our feelings towards her was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty . . . Whenever one had the chance to suck up, one did suck up, and at the first smile one’s hatred turned into a sort of cringing love.⁷⁷

Neil agrees. “Yeah, yup. No, honestly, she had that characteristic, so that there was a very widespread feeling, at many times, that ‘She was wrong, but she was strong.’”

Why, I ask him, were the British so susceptible to that characteristic? I don’t venture a theory, but he seems to think I’m advancing one. “I think that’s pop psychology went mad,” he says. “I think that’s complete bullshit. I think there’s a certain amount of—”

“You think asking the question is bullshit, or—”

“I don’t think that countries, mature countries have national moods like that, looking around, sucking our thumbs, waiting for cuddlesome old mothers. That’s just not the way it works.”

Now, I haven’t said anything of the sort, and the fact that he spontaneously injects the word “mother” into our discussion of Thatcher—and then dismisses the relevance of the word he introduced with such disproportionate indignation—strikes me as re-vealing, not about Thatcher or about the British nation, but about Kinnock himself. In fact, I encountered among almost all the male politicians to whom I spoke an almost violent antipathy to what seems to me an obvious psychological observation, one that anyone with the remotest degree of insight into human nature would accept: The way people react to a very powerful, middle-aged woman is apt to suggest something about their relationships with their mothers. I am not exactly casting a laser-light of fresh psychoanalytic acumen on the situation by suggesting this. Yet every time I even hinted so, the man to whom I was speaking reacted as if I had just said that I sensed a blockage in his heart chakra. I am not sure what to conclude from this, except, perhaps, that men who rise to the top of the power game tend to be men of action, not introspection.

“There is a segment of the Conservative Party,” Kinnock concedes, “whose main contacts with females in their formative years was with a matron at their public schools, and I don’t think you’d be stressing psychology too far to say that there were some who regarded her as Maggie the Matron, and were consequently exceedingly joyous if she showed them any kind of favor or even notice. Now, I wouldn’t say it was more than a segment, and I certainly wouldn’t say it was true of all the ex–public schoolboys. But some.”

“Yes,” I agree. “I’ve noticed that among some of the men I’ve spoken to, some of them are still nursing wounds, still nursing injured pride about slights from her, how she didn’t notice their brilliant report or whatever—”

“Yeah, it’s poisonous. I’m almost relieved by the fact that my dislike of her was absolutely constant. It never varied. I never needed a damned thing from her.”

Several more times during our conversation, he tells me that he simply couldn’t figure out how to attack a middle-aged woman without looking like a cad. He says this as if menopause were an illegal weapon. “The feeling I’m getting,” I say to Kinnock, “is that you did not feel that she played fair.”

“Oh, Christ, this is politics!”

“I know.”

“No, this is not boxing under the Queensbury rules, and it’s not association football! This is a blood sport!”

“Well, then, how come you weren’t willing to really stick it to her? I mean, you’re saying, ‘I didn’t want to use discourteous language, I didn’t want to be seen attacking a woman older than me,’ but if this is a blood sport, why didn’t you?”

He sighs. I feel a bit cruel now, as if I’m not playing fair myself, but I really do want to know how he explains this to himself. “Well, like I said,” he answers at last, “it would have been politically disadvantageous—but in any case, it would have bloody demeaned me to have done that. If you’re doing it, you know, toe-to-toe with a fellow about your age, or even if he’d been a bit older than myself, that would have been—”

“So you’re basically saying, ‘I couldn’t hit a girl.’”

“Well, I know I couldn’t hit a girl—”

“Yeah, but you know, she happened to be the prime minister. And you felt that you couldn’t hit back? Because she was a woman?”

“Not that I couldn’t hit back, I mean, I did hit back!”

I am left, in the end, with two images—a small boy of about three, red-haired, pink-faced, hiccupping as he fights back tears, staring into the looming face of an impossibly large woman in an apron. If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

And then, the image of a beleaguered middle-aged man with a thin fringe of wispy pumpkinish hair, lying on the psychotherapist’s couch.

“My mother,” he is saying, “was a formidable woman.”

Let’s return now to John Hoskyns—remember him, the wiring diagram? We have been talking about economics and the miners’ strike over lunch at the Travellers Club, but it is time to repair to the tea room, where his wife, Miranda, has arrived to join us. I have spoken to many men who knew Thatcher, but thus far no women: Miranda is the first. She is also the only interview subject to show even the remotest curiosity about me. She wants to know about my family, how I came to be a writer, why I live in Istanbul. Her feminine curiosity makes her to my mind an interesting witness. It suggests that she might pay attention to things in a way powerful men tend not to do.

I tell Miranda that I am so glad she joined us. I had been hoping for a woman’s perspective on Thatcher. She laughs, seeing right through me, and turns to her husband. “She’s hoping to get some gossip!”

“Gossip?” says John, as though it would never have occurred to him.

“Yes!” says Miranda.

John raises an eyebrow. “We never used to talk about anything except economic theory, did we? The Laffer Curve featured largely.”

Miranda permits herself a Mona Lisa smile. “If you’re occasionally allowed amongst these august presences,” she says, “you can be a fly on the wall, as it were, as a wife. Which is awfully useful.”

“Let’s start with your first impressions of her.”

“Well,” she says, “I was very left-wing, in the early ’70s. John and I used to argue. I was an artist, and all of my friends—”

“I’ll absent myself while she makes these confessions,” says John, chastely sipping his coffee. “I mean, she was an absolute Marxist.”

“No, I wasn’t a Marxist. Well, we used to have these violent arguments about politics . . . John and I used to argue at breakfast, and unfortunately his logic was so much stronger than mine that he eventually talked me out of it. So when he sold his company and decided he wanted to go into politics, I was appalled. Because a lot of people wanted him to get a seat. And I was horrified, because I didn’t know how I was going to explain it away to everybody. But I was beginning to understand what he was talking about. And I suppose it was after you met Keith Joseph that I first became aware of Maggie—it must have been about 1975, was it? I think I had seen pictures of her—she was known as Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher. I became aware of her and thought she was pretty awful. I really did. She wasn’t my kind of woman at all—”

“‘Pretty awful’ how?”

“She represented everything having to do with my own parents’ generation. To do with middle-class values, behaving properly, wearing hats—all the kinds of things that I was longing to throw away. Because the ’60s—although I was already married and having children—in the ’60s, I was thrilled with everything being overthrown, you know, all the terrible fuddy-duddy stuff. I didn’t want a royal family anymore, you know, freedom for everybody—I really thought it was wonderful! I wasn’t involved in it very much, but seen from the outside I thought it was a very good thing. And she represented, as she did to everybody on the Left, the absolute antithesis of that. She had nothing to do with that world of the ’60s. And I was in a very uncomfortable position, because I was beginning to see that John was right about what he was saying, or at least my brain told me he was right. My emotions told me he was all wrong, and he didn’t understand. He kept saying, ‘How do you think somebody like me, who’s an entrepreneur, can possibly make his way in the world with taxes and everything like that,’ and I kept arguing back, ‘Well, it’s your choice, you do it because you like doing it, you don’t mind about profits, they don’t matter,’ you know, all that sort of stuff. I mean—I was pretty silly.”

John nods wisely.

“But he was beginning to persuade me that he was right,” she continues. “So I was in this position of seeing this awful woman, knowing that she thought the same sorts of things as he did, and I had to be gradually converted over—and by the time she was likely to win in 1979, I was a terrific fan! I thought she was the most courageous and wonderful woman, and I was longing to get to know her.”

“Was there a moment in particular where your feelings began to change?” I ask. “Was it something that she said while campaigning, or—”

“I can’t remember exactly what it was, but there was a moment when I realized that she had a courage that nobody else seemed to have. And I admired the courage more than anything. I still deplore some of the things she stood for, but I admired her courage more than anything.”

“What do you deplore?”

“She’s—quite narrow-minded. She doesn’t like women. She doesn’t like women who—um—impinge on her life in any way. She’s absolutely charming to women who work for her, who, you know, waited on her in Chequers, in London. She was delightful with children, delightful. Absolutely charming to children—”

“Genuinely sweet—” says John.

“Oh, genuinely!” she agrees.

“Completely un-self-conscious, not—”

“Oh, absolutely!”

“Not knowing she was being observed, or—”

“Yes!”

“Very touching, that way.”

“One of my biggest memories,” says Miranda, “was this very touching way that she took this little boy, and I was just standing nearby, and she said”—Miranda’s voice becomes gentle and coaxing, like Mary Poppins—“‘Now, come along, shall we go to the kitchen? What’s your favorite food?’ And she walked out of the reception, and apparently got his favorite food, whatever it was. It was really lovely.”

“Lovely,” John agrees.

“But she didn’t like women,” she says. “And I wasn’t the only one to feel it. Nearly all the wives—I mean, I remember Peter Hennessy saying, ‘Those wives are going to get out their knitting needles one day!’”

“Why do you think she didn’t like women?” I ask.

“Because they were a threat to her. Because on one level, she was an attractive woman—”

“Yes,” agrees John in the slightly abstracted way of a man who hadn’t really thought about it before.

“I mean, there were some men, William Whitelaw, for instance, who found her dazzlingly attractive, and apparently when drunk made passes!” William Whitelaw was Thatcher’s deputy prime minister. She found him an invaluable source of support, famously announcing that “every prime minister needs a Willie.” She apparently said this in perfect innocence and had no idea why everyone found it so funny.

“Who did?” says John, suddenly curious.

“William Whitelaw!” she replies, pleased with herself.

“Oh, really?” says John.

“He supposedly said to her, ‘I’m in love with you!’”

John looks surprised. “Did you have a long conversation about it with Willie?”

“This is gossip! This is gossip! I didn’t, no.”

“Certainly, he got terribly emotional about her,” says John.

“Terribly emotional!” agrees Miranda.

“Saying, ‘She is the only—’”

They are talking over one another now, and I can’t catch what they’re saying. No matter. We have a a solid piece of unsourced gossip: Willie Whitelaw was in love with her. So was her parliamentary private secretary, Ian Gow, according to Alan Clark, who describes Gow’s devastation at being supplanted by another in the prime minister’s affections. “How ruthless women can be,” Clark laments. “Far worse than men. Ian was completely in love with the prime minister and utterly devoted to her.”⁷⁸

Miranda too was utterly devoted to the prime minister, and she too suffered her share of indignity. “I mean, I really came to the point where I really would have done anything for her. I thought she was so marvelous, and she just simply treated me like dirt.” She says this with no rancor—she seems to suggest with her voice that it was just one of those peculiar things about Margaret Thatcher, and nobody’s perfect. “And I came to the conclusion at the end that it was because at some of these gatherings and parties, I’d been in a group, with one or two other people, and we were all having a lot of fun. And she thought she wanted that fun, with the men, but she didn’t want the women there. It was something like that, some peculiar thing—”

“One of those female types,” I say, “and we all know them, who likes to be the center of male attention—”

“Absolutely!” says John.

“That’s it,” says Miranda simultaneously.

“Absolutely,” agrees John again, nodding vigorously.

“And there was one occasion,” Miranda recalls, “when she literally, when I was saying good-bye, literally—she used to do this to a lot of people—she’d take your hand to say good-bye, and you were just hoping to have a word or two, to say thank you—and she’d just sweep you out, and wait for the man to come—it’s very, very weird.”

“Like some old-fashioned Hollywood diva,” I say.

“Yes! Yes!” agrees John.

So what was it like, I ask, when this diva entered the room?

“She’d always be very correctly dressed,” Miranda says, “with all the jewelry in the right place.”

“Quick,” adds John. “A quick, funny, shuffling walk. Comes in through the door at very high speed and immediately shows off like mad to show she’s arrived—”

“Yes, shows off! She was a great shower-off. I mean, at the end of parties, when you were invited to stay and have a drink with her before she went off to the House of Commons, she would throw off her shoes, and sit down on the sofa with her feet up, and everyone would sort of cluster ’round her—which I used to feel very uncomfortable about—you know, everyone looking at her with worship. And she just showed off. Non-stop. Again, back to the diva, you know. Very much that sort of thing. But I’m thinking back to when I actually met her. John—I was hoping I would have met her the night of the election, when we were around at—um—Central Office?”

“Central Office,” he agrees.

“Once it became clear that she was in, and she was going to be elected, John came ’round and said, ‘OK, let’s go home and watch it on television.’ And I said, ‘But I’ve never met her!’ He said, ‘I don’t care, I’ve got to get out of this.’ And as we left, all the newspapermen outside the door, saying, ‘She’s coming! She’s on her way!’ And I couldn’t get back in again! I had to go home and watch it on television! I missed the whole thing. So I didn’t meet her until well after that. And she took hold of my hand, in a very friendly way, and said”—here Miranda breaks into a perfect impression of Thatcher’s imperious, regal voice—“‘Oh, well, I do hope you can spare your husband. You’ve got lots of things you like to do yourself, haven’t you.’ She didn’t ask me whether I had, she told me!”

Miranda is too charitable to dwell for long on these memories. “She was devoted to Denis,” she adds. “She adored him—”

“Yes, yes—” John nods vigorously.

“She was delightful. Now, you would expect someone like that to have a henpecked husband, who she was always telling what to do. Not a bit of it! She was very, very considerate and sweet to him. Really delightful.”

“Did she have a sense of humor?” I ask.

“She did,” says John, “but it only showed up every now and then . . . the only time I remember making her laugh was when we were sitting in the long library at Chequers, trying to write a speech. And there’d been a great scandal about a Labour shadow minister who’d been caught up in some enormous affair with a married woman, which had upset his political career, and there was a picture of him at an air display at Farnborough sitting next to the queen.” John begins laughing—in fact, he begins laughing so hard that the next part of his story is unintelligible. “And of course there was the implication of all journalism, that, you know, he’d been shagging this bird, and was absolutely . . .” Now they are both doubled over with laughter. I have no idea what’s so funny. “And I was there with the paper, saying, you know, ‘This man must go!’ And she absolutely fell about! And I remember her being fairly obvious and saying he needed a quick forty winks, you know! And to my astonishment—she really thought that was funny!”

This photograph of Denis and Margaret Thatcher immediately puts me in mind of columnist Julie Burchill’s wonderful description of their marriage: “Denis was so supremely self-confident/drunk that he didn’t give a fig about being seen as an alpha woman’s consort; with the quiet, amused, ceaseless tolerance of the little woman’s little ways typical of the real man, he was a tower of strength disguised as a bumbling buffoon—never the cretinous yes-man caricature portrayed by some weird lefties who, while paying lip service to feminism, seemed decidedly uncomfortable at the sight of a man walking behind a woman.” (Courtesy of the family of Srdja Djukanovic)

I later listened to this part of the transcript several times, trying to figure out what he was talking about. I’m still not sure. Perhaps you had to be there.

“Yes,” says Miranda, “she quite liked—”

“Slightly raunchy humor,” he finishes for her.

“Yes, she quite liked raunchy humor with the boys, but again, would never have done with women!”

“No!” he agrees.

“You know, she loved to be thought of as one of the boys, making slightly risqué jokes—”

They are enjoying these memories. As they finish each other’s sentences, their eyes meet and sparkle with affection. One can never know what another couple’s marriage is really like, but they certainly give the impression that theirs is the very ideal of what marriage ought to be. This, I think, must be why Miranda is so sanguine about the prime minister’s rudeness to her: Only a very well-loved woman could be so charitable.

Margaret Thatcher may have liked to think of herself as one of the boys. The boys, I gather, did not quite think of her as one of them. But one of the men—that’s another story. “Reagan, Gorbachev, and Thatcher,” says John, “that triumvirate—just amazing. She could just walk the world stage by then, looking like a million dollars, with a fur hat on, in Warsaw, through the snow, and we thought—this woman was a star! And not only that, but unlike the French people, her economy isn’t in trouble. You know, her economy, now everyone is looking to it, saying, ‘Perhaps this is the way we should do things!’ And now here she is, saying, ‘This is the way the West has got to deal with the Soviets!’”

The footage of Thatcher in Poland is indeed unforgettable.⁷⁹ In 1988, as the Polish economy was collapsing and the Solidarity movement was gaining strength, Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski invited Thatcher to visit Poland. He was presumably hoping to enlist the support of the woman who had vanquished her unions in Britain; perhaps he expected a cozy tête-à-tête, one union-crusher to another.⁸⁰ He was to be severely disappointed. As a condition of her visit, Mrs. Thatcher demanded the communist government allow her to meet Solidarity leader Lech Walesa. They agreed. “You didn’t say no to Mrs. Thatcher,” Lech Walesa recalled. “No one refused her.”⁸¹

She sailed into the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk aboard a small ship. The docks were lined with vast throngs of shipyard workers dressed in their drab, oil-stained, Soviet-regulation boiler suits. Defying the police blockade, they climbed the gates and clambered atop the cranes and roofs surrounding the shipyards to catch a glimpse of her. In the video footage she seems literally to be casting light upon the grayness: It is almost as if she has been shot in Technicolor against a black-and-white background. Before the great crowds she passes, slowly, regally. The men and women in the crowd wave and wave and peer at her with hopeful reverence; they chant “Solidarność! Solidarność!” and “Vivat Thatcher!”

She lays a wreath at the monument to shipyard workers killed in 1970 by the security forces. The crowds roar as she addresses them: “Solidarity was, is, and will be!” “Thatcher! Thatcher!” “Send the Reds to Siberia!” Solidarity workers escort her to a packed church. There the entire congregation—faces cragged and careworn—begins, in unison, to sing the Solidarity anthem. The camera focuses on Thatcher’s face. Her eyes are filled with tears.

It was at this point, I imagine, that Jaruzelski realized, his head sinking into his hands with horror, that he was completely and utterly finished.

Thinking of that scene, I remark to John and Miranda, “It’s a very strange thing, political charisma. It’s fascinating to try to understand what it is, and how it works—”

“Fascinating,” Miranda agrees. “And you do feel this ability of certain people to transmit it—it is a kind of magical thing.”

She had that magic, no doubt. But in the end, they both agree, there was something more than charisma at work. She had guts. John remembers the way she rose to the occasion on October 12, 1984, when an IRA bomb blasted apart the Brighton Grand Hotel. Thatcher and the members of her cabinet were staying there before the opening of the Conservative Party conference. The prime minister and her husband narrowly escaped injury, but five of her friends were killed. Margaret Tebbit, the wife of her cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, was paralyzed.

The bomb went off at 2:54 a.m. The prime minister was—as usual—awake and working on her speech for the next day. “The air was full of thick cement dust,” she recalls in her memoirs. “It was in my mouth and covered my clothes as I clambered over discarded belongings and broken furniture towards the back entrance of the hotel.”⁸² She was taken to the police station, where she changed from her nightclothes into a navy suit. Her friends and colleagues arrived, suggesting she return to Number 10. “No,” she said. “I am staying.”⁸³ Then—and this is the detail that makes you realize that this woman is not like you and not like me—she lay down and took a short nap, so to be fresh for the long day ahead of her. After she woke she took breakfast, she recalls, with plenty of black coffee.

Hours after surviving an assassination attempt, she walked into the conference center at 9:30 a.m., precisely on time. She delivered her speech, partly ad-libbed. “The bomb attack,” she began,

. . . was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference. It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared. And the fact that we are gathered here now—shocked, but composed and determined—is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.⁸⁴

With that said, she proceeded briskly to defend her government’s economic policies.

The weekend following, she described the event thus: “We picked ourselves up and sorted ourselves out as all good British people do, and I thought, let us stand together, for we are British.”⁸⁵ If anyone was in doubt before this that she could walk the walk as well as she talked the talk, they were not now.

“I remember writing to her afterwards,” recalls John, “saying what an appalling thing it was and how absolutely right she’d been to just let it have no effect at all. And she wrote the most marvelous letter back, I mean, full of sort of ranting and raving about, ‘The forces against democracy must never be allowed to triumph,’ and that sort of thing. But it was absolutely from the heart. And I think again and again one finds, all the time, that the one thing that people know—was there was this absolute lion heart. Courage. It really was there.”

Miranda nods. This is why she would have done anything for a woman who showed not a bit of graciousness to her.

Even Thatcher’s detractors concede her courage. Her charisma, on the other hand, was not a universal emollient. However powerfully it affected her admirers, it was incomprehensible to her adversaries. Bill Clinton’s sworn enemies will usually admit, grudgingly, that there is something charming about the man. Not Thatcher’s. Kinnock’s views are typical.

CB: Did you like Margaret at all?

NK: No. [Emphatic and cold]

CB: I see. You really didn’t like her personally.

NK: No. She didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her.

CB: If you had met her in another context, a social context, not a political context, what kind of reaction do you think you might have had to her?

NK: Same as most other people.

CB: Which was?

NK: That she was cold, arrogant, patronizing, snobbish—

CB: Do you have an anecdote . . . can you tell me about something she said that would really bring that alive for me?

NK: In the week of the Lockerbie disaster, the terrorist sabotage of the 747, quite naturally both she and I went to the memorial service that was held in the village of Lockerbie. And at the service, we went into the church hall to meet the bereaved relatives. And of course there were United States citizens and British, one or two others, but they were the main passengers on the 747. And she said to me, very unusually, “Would you be good enough to come in with me.” Because we’d been to several memorial occasions, and she generally tended to sort of stay apart. Which suited me fine. So I went in with her. She walked up to a group of black Americans. I would say probably servicemen’s families—

CB:—yeah, a lot of servicemen—

NK:—six or seven of them. And she sort of walked up to them, and put her head to one side, which was quite characteristic of her, and said [absolutely perfect imitation of MT’s voice] “And how many did you lose.” [Snorts in disgust] I mean, these people didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Maybe it was her accent. But I was shocked to my roots. I mean, of all the opening questions—how many did you lose? When the hairy free enterprise—

CB: I’m sorry, which enterprise?

NK: There was a ship, a ferry, called the Herald of Free Enterprise, which was coming out of Zeebrugge harbor in Belgium, and the cargo, the hold doors were opened as the ship started to move, the water came in and the ship rolled over, and 150 people were killed, including several of the crew of the ferry. We went to the memorial which was held in Canterbury Cathedral, down in southeast England near to Dover. And after the service the clergy sent everybody, the grieving relatives and everybody else, down to the crypt of the church for tea, or brandy if we wanted it. And of course, quite naturally, quite a lot of the survivors from the crew, family, working-class people, lit cigarettes. Absolutely naturally. None of the clergy turned their heads. They didn’t even notice it was happening, they were busy going around comforting people. And I was about two yards away from Margaret Thatcher, talking to people—my wife is from a seafaring family, so we have a natural empathy with these sorts of people on these occasions. Thatcher went up and told them [voice rises, scolding, mimicking her voice, uncannily accurate], “You shouldn’t be smoking in here!”

CB: Oh, my God!

NK: “This is consecrated grrrround. You should put those cigarettes out!”

CB: Oh, God, that’s a very telling anecdote. Do you have more like that?

NK: Yeah, yeah. Lots of them. Lots of them—but I’ve gone far enough. I tell you why. Because these were very, very somber, very sad occasions. I’ll only repeat those two. But they’re only a sample. Sadly. To show that she just had no social skills in those circumstances—

CB: But, come on, how could she have been as successful a politician as she was with no social skills ? Surely you must have also seen a different side of her, a charming side—

NK: No. [Icy]

CB: Never?

NK: No. [Emphatic]

CB: You don’t remember any moment when you thought, “Oh, that’s her charm. That must be it.”

NK: No. [Emphatic. A long, cold silence]

Back now to Charles Powell, in his Georgian mansion on Queen Anne’s Gate. It is late in the afternoon, post-prandial, dozy. The weather is muggy. The air is still. Powell’s hands remain folded in his lap, and I suspect that he rather wishes I were not there so that he might shut the door, tell his secretary to hold his calls, stretch out for a few minutes on the sofa, and close his eyes. Thatcher, from her picture frame, surveys the scene with what seems by contrast an almost lunatic vitality. “Is a personality like hers a freak of nature,” I ask him, “or do you think there was something in her background that created this phenomenon?”

“It’s a very good question, and one I’ve never been able to answer. Because it’s quite clear there was this enormous change of gear, that up until 1974, ’75, she had been a talented, able, hardworking, but not particularly distinguished member of a couple of Conservative governments, and a bright young sort of political candidate. Something between 1975 and 1978–9 changed her from that, into being somebody who dug deep into herself and really thought, ‘Look, this can’t go on, I’m going to change it, and I’ve got the willpower to do it.’ I don’t know how this sort of Pauline conversion really happened, but it did. Now, some of it was certainly under the influence of Keith Joseph, but something really changed in her character in that time. Did it have roots? Yes, of course it did, it had roots from her upbringing and her father, you know, the sort of Methodist insistence on the virtues of hard work, improving herself, getting herself up from a sort of grammar school girl, pretty undistinguished little town in the Midlands—”

“If you were to just speculate, wildly, about what might have happened between 1975 and 1979, what do you think might have happened?”

“Well, part of it was the depth of Britain’s condition by that time. I mean, in the latter years of the Macmillan government when she was having her first years on the job you could conclude that Britain wasn’t too bad of a place, I mean, you remember the slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ the slogan on which Macmillan went into the ’57 election. But in the early ’70s we were beyond all that, that was certainly an important part of it, but what else changed it—I just don’t know, it’s almost insane . . . a vision, some sort of lightning striking from heaven, but there was something. Something happened there. I mean, she herself claims, really, she just was forced finally to think why earlier Conservative governments had failed. But I’ve never been able to explain this. I remember when reviewing her autobiography, I identified this as the greatest mystery about her, really.”

“As have I,” I agree. “I find myself confronted with statements she made such as, ‘I knew I was the only one who could do it,’ and the question I keep coming back to is, how on earth does anyone, anyone have that kind of self-confidence, no less a woman, at that time, of her background—”

“Yes, well, people do, I suppose. Stalin had it—”

“And people ask the same questions about Stalin—”

“Yes, yes. Is it nature? Of course, it helped, I think, the other factors in her character. She could never see two sides of a question. There was only one side of a question, as far as she was concerned. I mean, most of us are reasonable people, we can see the pros and the cons, but she was not the slightest bit interested in the cons, she—this is the way it was going to be done, and don’t worry about the arguments against it, this is the way. Now, of course it makes you very vulnerable if you’re wrong, but she was right an awful lot of the time, and therefore her self-belief grew to vast proportions, and in the end of course it was part of her downfall. She’d become clearly imperial, by the end. You could say it’s a weakness, but it can be a great strength, politically, too, especially in crisis.”

“Do you remember ever seeing her in a moment of profound doubt? Ever?”

He pauses for quite some time. “No, I don’t think I do. Not profound doubt. Profound doubt about whether she was going to get through, not because she was wrong, but were the odds stacked against her too much? I think you can say, certainly in the early days of the government, on the economy, I think she probably felt that—I think she had some moments of doubt. Certainly on the Falklands conflict, when she took on the extraordinary task of sending out the expeditionary force 8,000 miles—”

“Doubt, or anxiety?”

“Well, doubt, too, I think. Yeah, anxiety, certainly, she got very nervous before big speeches, terrible business trying to keep her sedated, as it were, before she went on stage. She was always convinced at the last moment that she had the wrong text, or it wasn’t going to work, or whatever, but that was just a way of pumping up the adrenaline. Lots of fine opera singers, or whatever, suffer the same phenomenon.”

A diva, again. The image comes up over and over. So do the others.

Powell’s secretary knocks on the door. Our time is up. I fit in one more question. “Why does she matter?”

“I think,” he says, “the overall message would be that you can change a country—a lot of people think you can’t; you can run a country, you can administer it, but don’t be silly, governments come and go, life goes on, you can’t change it. Now, you have Mr. Sarkozy saying he can change France—and it will be very interesting to see if he does—but she shows that it can be done. I think that’s a very important lesson. And from the point of view of the rest of the world, well, I think she did a better job than anyone of exposing socialism and really destroying it. I mean, there’s no socialism left in this country and there’s not much left in Europe. No one believes in socialism anymore.”