EPILOGUE
It has been more than fifteen years since I last took an exam that counted for anything. But I still have the dream. I have it all the time. I am sitting down to take my final exams, but when I open the exam booklet I realize, with dawning horror, that I haven’t studied at all. I have never opened the book. In fact, I haven’t been to class once the entire term.
I mention this to Neil Kinnock as our conversation draws to a close. I ask him whether he still dreams about facing Margaret Thatcher at Prime Minister’s Questions. “No,” he says. “But I do dream about my exams, and it’s forty-odd years since I sat any! I know exactly what you mean.”
We marvel briefly at the weird ubiquity of this dream. I have no idea why so many people have it.
But Kinnock insists he never dreams about Thatcher. “No, no,” he says. “I don’t. Maybe, I’ll tell you, because of this factor: She went through the door because we were beating Margaret Thatcher and were going to inflict a terminal defeat on her. So maybe I don’t dream about it because of that.”
“Right.”
“And secondly, when I failed to beat John Major—much more narrowly, of course, but I failed to beat him in 1992—I decided the curtain was coming down on that. Because I just could not live on a diet of memories. I mean, I was fifty years of age. And that was—if the worst decision I ever made was not to denounce Scargill, and demand a ballot, and say publicly they couldn’t win without one, that was my worst decision—then my best—politically, I mean, my best decision ever was to ask my wife to marry me—maybe my best political decision was to bring that curtain down and stick to it.”
“Yeah. Absolutely. I completely understand that.”
And I do. How well I do.
“I’d probably be dead now. I probably would have corroded myself to death.”
The art of bringing down the curtain is hard to master. It has not been easy for Margaret Thatcher. Nigel Lawson remarks to me that she had no interests outside of politics. “I mean, she was interested in ideas, and religion, and so on, but she wasn’t interested in sports, she wasn’t . . . ”
His voice trails off. I finish his sentence for him. “She wasn’t the woman you’d go to for a good game of snooker.”
“Absolutely not.”
He chuckles bloodlessly. It is the only time I hear him laugh.
It has been more than eighteen years since her precipitous tumble from power. Thatcher’s former friends and allies are still grudging with their praise, eager to appropriate credit for her achievements, smoldering with petty resentments. In part, of course, this is inevitable—proximity to power is not known for making men more generous in spirit.
Margaret Thatcher herself is ill, and deeply lonely. Denis Thatcher died in 2003. She had cooked his breakfast every morning until the end. She would let no one else do it.
Carol Thatcher, her daughter, says that her mother has never fully recovered from her betrayal. “Treachery,” said Carol, “festers in your DNA.”
A full-time assistant cares for the former prime minister now. Of course, her friends still visit her. Gorbachev, in particular, has been kind. “One of the nicest things about him,” Charles Powell tells me, “is he does come to see her now when he comes to the UK. And he knows she doesn’t really make sense now, and there are days when she doesn’t even really remember who he is, but he comes along, and usually brings a daughter, or a granddaughter, and a nice present, and sits . . . he sits and talks to her, and she repeats herself, or says the same question three times. He doesn’t mind, goes over it, and it’s really nice to see. Actually, he’s one of the people who’s treated her most kindly, most courteously, since she’s had troubles.”
Not long ago, while touring an animal shelter to which she had made a donation, Margaret Thatcher—now Baroness Thatcher—encountered Marvin, an elderly and abandoned tabby cat. She and Marvin saw in each other’s eyes a flicker of understanding.
She adopted him on the spot.
