The labor unrest of the Winter of Discontent gradually ebbed as wage deals were made to placate the unions. But the damage had been done. Inflation was starting to rise again. Prime Minister Callaghan’s reputation as the man who could bring the unions to reason had been demolished. And now a new threat arose to his government from an entirely different quarter.
Among the many other problems facing the United Kingdom during the 1970s was a sharp rise in nationalist sentiment in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. In 1978, Callaghan tried to mollify the advocates of Scottish independence by promising them greater powers of self-administration, to be vested in a Scottish legislature. The act was supposed to be confirmed by a referendum, which was held on March 1, 1979. But earlier, as the law creating the new legislature passed through the British Parliament, a Labour parliamentarian opposed to the devolution of powers had tacked on a condition setting a higher bar for approval. As a result, the referendum didn’t pass, even though most of the Scots who participated had voted yes. Angry Scottish nationalists in the House of Commons, who felt they’d been betrayed by Callaghan’s government, vowed revenge. There were only a few of them in the House of Commons, but the government was by now so unpopular, and enjoyed such a perilous margin of support, that they felt they could do some real damage. They tabled a no-confidence vote.
The leader of the opposition immediately spotted an opportunity to bring down the government. Ironically, Margaret Thatcher and her fellow Conservatives were fiercely opposed to Scottish devolution. But this was a classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Liberal Party, which had lent its support to Callaghan’s government for a while, had followed the changing electoral winds and shifted back to opposition. The Labour Party had also lost two by-elections on March 1, shaving its majority even further. Thatcher decided that it was worth the gamble. She put down her own no-confidence motion, which took precedence over the one initiated by the Scottish nationalists, on March 28. If the motion passed, Callaghan would be forced to call a fresh election.
The day of the vote has been described as one of the most dramatic moments in British parliamentary history. The catering staff was on strike, so members of Parliament had to bring their lunches with them. The party whips, charged with marshaling the votes, engaged in frantic maneuvering. One Labour member was dying of a heart ailment in a Yorkshire hospital, and for a while the prime minister considered bringing him down to Westminster in an ambulance; Callaghan ultimately decided against it. Thatcher struggled to maintain her composure. As the vote count proceeded, she and her Tory colleagues agonized over the outcome. For a while they thought that they had lost. But then the tally was announced: Ayes, 311. Noes, 310. It was the first no-confidence motion lost by a British government since 1925. At that moment, as Thatcher rather extravagantly recalls in her memoirs, “James Callaghan’s Labour Government, the last Labour Government and perhaps the last ever, fell from office.” In a sense she was right. Labour would take the helm of government again, many years later, but by then it would be a party completely transformed—not least by the success of the counterrevolution she was about to launch.
When the election finally came, Norman Tebbit was ready for it. By the spring of 1979 he had already served two terms in Parliament. A staunch Tory, Tebbit represented the London suburb of Chingford. This was not the sort of affluent, traditionally minded area that would have counted as typical Conservative territory. Tebbit’s voters were what he described as “aspirational working class”— skilled laborers who were skeptical about the leaders of their own unions and increasingly viewed high taxes, inflation, and government regulation as curbs on their upward mobility. On top of that, many of them commuted to jobs in London, so they had been hit hard by the transportation strikes of the Winter of Discontent— “a game changer,” Tebbit calls it, that aggravated an already widespread sense of anger at the disproportionate power of the unions. His voters also had plenty of firsthand stories to tell about abuses of power by union leaders (who, for example, might bring in outside workers during strike votes to ensure that they got the result they wanted). As Tebbit canvassed his district, he uncovered an intense sense of frustration with the symptoms of British decline. His tough rhetoric on the need to rein in organized labor resonated with voters.
For Tebbit, there was no mistaking the signs of a building desire for drastic change among his constituents, and Margaret Thatcher, he believed, was the perfect politician to take advantage of such sentiments. Despite his relatively low position in the Conservative Party’s parliamentary ranks, Tebbit was uniquely qualified to make such an assessment. Long known within the party as a staunch right-winger, Tebbit had joined forces with Thatcher early on. In 1975 he had served as a member of the team (led by the brilliant political strategist Airey Neave) that had engineered her election as leader of the party. Since then Tebbit had belonged to a small group that helped to prep Thatcher for parliamentary debates, a job that gave him ample insight into her way of doing things. It was his immense respect for her that yielded one of the best laugh lines in his 1979 stump speech. Thatcher was one of the most talented leaders in Westminster, he assured his election-rally listeners. As a matter of fact, he would add, “She’s the best man among them.”1
The election of 1979 marked a watershed moment in British politics. This is not to say that everything about the vote was black-and-white. It is, for example, indeed true—as many contemporary historians are wont to point out—that Thatcher was careful to avoid making her proposals sound too radical and that the Conservative manifesto (the party program) included little in the way of detailed policies for change. It is true that she might have faced a much different political landscape if Callaghan had called for a general election back in the early fall of 1978 (as some of his advisers had counseled), before the Winter of Discontent had left British voters conclusively disgusted with the direction of the country. And it is even true that her personal popularity rating remained well below Callaghan’s right up to the end.
Yet despite these qualifiers, there can be no mistaking the fact that Thatcher used the election of 1979 to offer a fundamental break with the way the country had been governed. Voters saw that she was offering a dramatically new approach to dealing with the unions, and it was also clear to them that she was proposing a new set of policies on management of the economy. She pledged change to an electorate that was deeply disillusioned with the status quo—and she did this less through election documents than through her own speeches and campaign appearances. Along the way she also departed decisively from the received wisdom on British electioneering. The message here was, at least in part, the medium—Margaret Thatcher herself.
Conservative leaders before her had focused their campaigns on the classic Tory electorate—those members of the middle and upper classes living in the more affluent parts of the country. Thatcher and her advisers, however, set out to target voter categories long neglected by Conservative campaigners. She made a point, for example, of specifically wooing skilled laborers of the type that Tebbit was courting in his home district. Known in the mysterious argot of British pollsters as “C2s,” these workers had long been considered automatic Labour voters. Thatcher disagreed. She believed that many union members resented the undemocratic ways and the cynical tactics of their leaders, and she surmised that many working-class voters would be correspondingly receptive to her calls for greater constraints on union power. She also felt that upwardly mobile workers would welcome her proposals to allow the tenants of public housing to buy their homes. She reasoned that many C2s were also tired of inflation and runaway spending. This was why she staged her first big election rally in the traditional Labour stronghold of Cardiff in Wales. “Labour, the self proclaimed party of compassion, has betrayed those for whom it promised to care,” she told her audience. “So in this campaign we’ll not only extend and consolidate Conservative support, we’ll carry the fight right into what were once the castles and strongholds of Labour, and in many places we’ll win.”2
Her campaign tactics were equally novel. She shunned the traditional Conservative support network in the broadsheet newspapers and favored instead the tabloids and daytime TV—an approach that allowed her to tap into a new electorate in the embattled middle classes who felt threatened by the growing power of the state and the unions and also allowed her to avoid probing questions about policy specifics. She made aggressive use of television, whereupon she was accused (comical as it might seem to a modern audience) of the egregious sin of importing “American-style campaigning” to Britain. She proved very effective at exploiting the medium—especially once her adviser Gordon Reece prevailed upon her to lower her voice, an adjustment that lent her gravitas and authority.
This might seem trivial, but it was especially important in light of Callaghan’s magisterial efforts to use her gender against her. It was not so much what he said as how he said it; he was a master at sardonically implying that whatever the leader of the opposition said was made even sillier by the fact that it was being said by a woman. She countered this by doing what she had always done to beat so many male competitors before: she worked harder, sleeping just a few hours a night as she relentlessly studied her briefing papers and learned her lines. At the same time, she turned her gender to her own advantage by slipping, when she chose to, into the role of a commonsensical housewife, hoisting sample grocery bags to drive home the corrosive effects of runaway prices on the ordinary household budget. Nor was she afraid to give interviews to women’s magazines in which she shared recipes and stressed her fussy mastery of good housekeeping. Not only did this help to draw in female voters, but it also underlined her point that the economic remedies she was proposing were less a matter of abstract theories than of the everyday ethos of thrift and moderation on which many British households prided themselves.
Thatcher and her team found other ways to make the argument that Britain needed a change of course. In 1978, casting around for a new approach to her campaign, she had hired two young budding advertisers, Maurice Saatchi and Charles Saatchi, to come up with fresh ideas. They produced the famous poster depicting a long queue of people winding around the slogan LABOUR ISN’T WORKING. Once you saw the image, it was a hard thought to get out of your head. The tagline nicely bundled several strands of disappointment. Callaghan’s economic policies were supposed to be aimed at producing full employment, but jobs were becoming scarce. He claimed that his close ties with the unions were supposed to enable good labor relations—but the Winter of Discontent showed that his government had delivered only chaos and dysfunction.
Callaghan’s strategy was to depict Thatcher as an unbalanced radical whose extremist experiments would damage the gradual restoration of British economic fortunes that he claimed was already under way. Thatcher, in response, was careful not to be too specific with her promises. The 1979 Conservative election manifesto began by declaring that “the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favor of the State at the expense of individual freedom” and warned that “this may be the last chance we have to reverse that process.” The Tories pledged to fight back by cutting spending and tightening the money supply. The manifesto promised moderate curbs on union power, such as wider use of secret ballots and a law to prevent the spread of closed-shop rules (which imposed union membership on all the employees of a particular company). It vowed to reduce tax burdens and to prevent the government from taking over still more industries (the only hint of privatization was a mention of selling some shares in recently nationalized companies back to their employees). It also included calls for law and order and a strong national defense. It was a clear contrast to the programs offered by Labour and the Liberals, but it was hardly the stuff of revolution. The election campaign showed her to be a cautious, calculating, and eminently practical campaigner. She knew what she had to do.
In the end it all worked to her advantage. Voters wanted change; they merely had to be persuaded to take the chance. Thatcher was ready to help them. In 1968 Richard Nixon had decided to play on the discontent of conservative southern Democrats in an effort to woo them into voting Republican. Now the British Conservative Party tried something similar, launching an unprecedented campaign to persuade Labour voters that their party no longer stood for their values. Many were ready to listen. In the final days of the campaign, Thatcher spoke stirringly of a “world-wide revolt against big government, excessive taxation and bureaucracy,” of an era “drawing to a close.”3 Little did she know that, at about the same time, Callaghan had reached a similar conclusion. He confided to one of his aides that they were witnessing “a sea change” in politics, an epochal shift of a kind that comes along once in a generation—and this time “it is for Mrs. Thatcher.” But this, of course, was a private thought. In public, he showed no lack of resolve.
She was an odd phenomenon in so many ways, this Thatcher. She ran a party that still bore the imprint of her predecessor as party leader, Edward Heath. The Conservative election manifesto in 1979 did not differ conspicuously from the program on which the party had campaigned under Heath in 1970. Most of the members of her shadow cabinet had served in comparable positions under Heath. The voters still didn’t really know her, and she did not spend much time lingering over her own biography. She never managed to raise her personal popularity to the level of Callaghan’s; indeed, the gap was increasing as the election neared.
Her image makers were all too aware of the problem. As election day neared, they did their best to keep her voice off the airwaves. They also staged photo opportunities carefully designed to make her look as unthreatening as possible—perhaps most famously when she traveled to a farm and hefted a newborn calf for the photographers. Though Thatcher later became famous for her domineering manner, during the 1979 campaign she was happy to yield to the advice of her handlers. In stark contrast to Keith Joseph, her volatile mentor, Thatcher never forgot for a moment that she was above all a politician. And not only did she know how to play the game, but she was determined to be better at it than anyone else.
But she was, of course, hardly a typical Tory politician. Her gender was not the only thing that made her unique. It was also her unapologetic commitment to the ideals of freedom. In her last major speech before the election, in her constituency in the London suburb of Finchley, she made her priorities unmistakably clear. “Of course it has been about prices and jobs and standard of living and all the economic things, but this election is about even more than the cost of the shopping basket,” she told her audience. “It really is about our fundamental freedoms and the future of our whole way of life in this country.” She stressed the need to end the long erosion of personal freedom, to halt the breakneck growth of the state. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are not prepared to accept decline for Britain as inevitable. We wish to change it and we will shall change it!” She cited the long list of former Labour grandees who had recently gone public with their denunciation of the Labour Party and once again ran through the Conservative blueprint for containing inflation, cutting taxes, restraining union power, and restoring the preconditions for an “enterprise society.” And she wound it up by returning to her favorite theme. “Much of politics is fought about what you might call the economic factors or the material factors, and sometimes too little attention is given to the moral factors,” she told her audience. “But you know, in the end, it’s the moral factors which decide the status and pride of a nation.” And that “moral case,” she informed them, “is on the side of the free society.” The choice that Britain now faced was one between a freer state that ensured personal liberties and economic initiative—or the one envisioned by Labour, where the state played an ever-increasing role. This was not the voice of Britain’s postwar consensus. This was something verifiably new.4
The ideas that Thatcher broached in her 1979 campaign speeches promised change to British voters precisely because few British politicians before her had spoken with such ringing conviction about the challenge to freedom posed by a growing state. But the ideas themselves, as Thatcher well knew, had been around for some time.
In 1947, two years after Britain’s march to New Jerusalem began, a group of thirty-six thinkers—economists, historians, journalists, and philosophers—met at a Swiss resort to discuss the fate of Western society. They were all devotees of classical liberal economics, and they were united by a fear that freedom was under threat. The source of that threat was the spirit of collectivism that they saw in the beginnings of the British welfare state, the prevalence of socialist thinking, and the onset of the Keynesian economic revolution. The man who had convened them was an Austrian economist, Friedrich von Hayek, who taught at the London School of Economics (LSE). (He knew Keynes well. During the war, when Hayek was lecturing at Cambridge, he had shared fire-warden duties with his celebrated counterpart.) Hayek was particularly worried about the way that his academic colleagues had provided intellectual support for wartime planning that concentrated economic decision making in the state. A few years earlier he had published a book called The Road to Serfdom, an articulate polemic about the perils of liberty in a world where planners increasingly reigned. Most of those in the British establishment dismissed the book’s ideas. (That did not stop it from becoming a surprise best-seller in the United States.)
Most of the men—and they were, in fact, all men—who came together to form the Mont Pèlerin Society (named after the resort where they met) drew their intellectual sustenance from three particular universities: the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and the University of Vienna. It was these three universities that would deliver many of the crucial theoretical and academic underpinnings for the liberal counterrevolution the new society hoped to unleash. Among the men present were Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Karl Popper—each of whom would help to reshape twentieth-century discourse about political liberty and market economics in the decades to come. Hayek opened the meeting with an address in which he asserted that “a great intellectual task must be performed” if the ideals of liberty were to be revived. That task, he said, involved “both purging traditional liberal theory of certain accidental accretions which have become attached to it in the course of time, and also facing up to some real problems which an over-simplified liberalism has shirked or which have become apparent only since it has turned into a stationary and rigid creed.”5
The participants passed a broad manifesto pledging to defend the values of an open society, combat the encroachments of totalitarianism, and search for ways to guarantee a stable and peaceful international order. Its statement of aims concluded with the assurance that the group rejected “propaganda” and had no intention of establishing a new orthodoxy to replace the ones it denounced. The drafters also denied any particular partisan affiliation. Their object, they said, was “solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.”6
This might have seemed like a decidedly modest agenda. But the attendees at the conference felt themselves to be intellectual outcasts. In the postwar United States, the principles of New Deal interventionism and wartime bureaucratic management still reigned supreme. Hayek loved to tell a story about West Germany’s top economic bureaucrat, Ludwig Erhard, who had decided in 1948 to free all prices and production controls overnight, thereby unleashing the postwar economic miracle. Academic economists throughout the English-speaking world pooh-poohed the decision. According to Hayek, Erhard had received a phone call from Lucius Clay, the US general in charge of administering still-occupied Germany, who informed him that “‘my advisers tell me you are making a great mistake.’ Erhard replied, ‘So my advisers are also telling me.’”7 In fact, of course, the radical reforms launched by Erhard had placed Germany on the path to an extraordinary economic revival.
It struck the Pèlerins as ironic that Britain, given its role as the birthplace of classical liberalism, was the place where their ideological crusade against statism faced its biggest uphill climb. Labour’s cradle-to-grave welfare state was sweeping all before it; the younger generation in the Conservative Party, led by R. A. Butler, believed that the Tories should yield to the spirit of the times.
Among those who disagreed was a British businessman who proved to be a key personality in this struggle. He was not a particularly distinguished academic, nor was he a notably adept politician. He was, instead, a hybrid of the two, and his name was Anthony Fisher.
Much later Milton Friedman would refer to him as “the single most important person in the development of Thatcherism.” While Hayek and his scholarly colleagues appreciated the “seminal importance of ideas,” in the words of journalist Richard Cockett, it was the businessman Fisher who figured out the most effective means for spreading those ideas far beyond the precincts of academe.8
Fisher brought to this effort his remarkable skills as an entrepreneur. After earning a degree in engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had shown a knack for business by opening his own car rental company in the late 1930s. During the war he made a name for himself with inventions for the Royal Air Force, and once it was over he went back into business—this time, oddly enough, in farming, at which he became a tremendous success. Like many others, he was deeply impressed by Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, and a few years after the war’s end he sought out the author for advice. Fisher wanted to contribute to the fight against socialism. Hayek advised him to forget about a career in politics. What was needed, he said, was a “scholarly research organization” that could argue the case for free-market economics and disseminate its conclusions to the broadest possible audience.9
In 1955, Fisher, with the help of some like-minded colleagues, founded the Institute for Economic Affairs. In its structure and its mission, the IEA was explicitly modeled after the Fabian Society. Founded in 1884, the Fabian Society was the brainchild of early British socialists who wanted to make the country more receptive to their ideas. As part of their effort, they had recruited wealthy patrons to sponsor professors at the LSE, who propagated the group’s moderate socialist thinking among the nation’s elites. “Socialism was spread in this way and it is time we reversed the process,” Fisher wrote to one of his colleagues.10
Fisher was content to be the institute’s author and patron, but he did not want to be responsible for its day-to-day management. He needed a director, and he soon found the perfect man in Ralph Harris, who had worked briefly for the Conservative Party’s think tank before taking a job as a lecturer in political economy at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Harris had flirted briefly with politics, having campaigned for the Conservative Party candidate in the elections in 19 51 and 1955, but Fisher insisted that he abandon his Conservative affiliation when he joined the IEA, since Fisher believed that the institute’s work would be more effective if it stayed clear of overt party ties. (The desire to preserve the institute’s charitable status presumably had something to do with it as well.)
Fisher, understanding that what the Communists referred to as “propaganda and agitation” stood at the center of the IEA’s mission, attributed great importance to the institute’s publishing effort, so he did not stint when it came to finding a suitable figure to run it. The man he found was Arthur Seldon. Like Harris, Seldon was of working-class origins, but in contrast to the IEA director, he had started off his political life, during his East End upbringing during the Great Depression, as a convinced socialist. (In this respect, and like quite a few of the other intellectual progenitors of Thatcherism, his ideological evolution presaged that of the American neoconservatives who emerged in the Reagan era and its aftermath. Many of them, too, had started off as members of the dogmatic Left before finding their way to the Republicans.) Seldon had undergone his own conversion when he began reading Hayek and other liberal thinkers at the LSE just before the war.11
Harris and Seldon took pride in embracing the unfashionable. One of the institute’s earliest pamphlets was a strident defense of the value of advertising at a time when the industry was under attack for allegedly misleading consumers. The provocation was entirely calculated. Harris and Seldon knew that they would not be able to make their mark without challenging orthodoxy head-on. Another early project was a pamphlet on pensions that attacked the notion of a comprehensive state system of social insurance for the elderly right at the moment when Labour was introducing just such a system. The IEA tried to keep its works relatively short and inexpensive to ensure the widest possible distribution. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the IEA’s authors became known among the cognoscenti for a steady stream of works on trade-union reform and monetary stability. Hayek and Friedman both wrote on these subjects. One of Friedman’s most notorious works bore the revealing title The Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory. It was a line of thinking that would soon come into its own as the horrors of stagflation became clear.12
There were other voices challenging the consensus, to be sure. Enoch Powell was one. But his political self-immolation with the “Rivers of Blood” speech had only reinforced the popular image of free marketeers as cranks who were out of step with the times. What the market proselytes needed was intellectual credibility, and the IEA supplied it. Increasing numbers of young academics, policy makers, and politicians began beating a path to the IEA’s door. But the IEA’s growing impact was such that even some on the Left were forced to acknowledge it. In 1968, David Collard of the Fabian Society published an analysis that shockingly conceded the intellectual coherence of the “New Right” exemplified by the IEA theoreticians.13
Margaret Thatcher joined their number rather late in the game; it was only in 1971, during her stint as a junior minister in Heath’s government, that she first cited one of the institute’s papers on education in a parliamentary debate. In the 1960s she appears to have focused more on building her Tory Party career than exploring fresh policy ideas. It was the profound disillusionment of the Heath U-turn, and the attendant realization that believers in the free market needed to articulate a persuasive case for their views, that finally convinced her, later in the 1970s, to seek out the work of the IEA. Before any notion of “Thatcherism” emerged, the IEA had already articulated a body of ideas that encompassed the major themes of Thatcher’s prime ministership.
One of the IEA’s biggest admirers was a rising Conservative Party star by the name of Keith Joseph. Despite the IEA’s ties to individual Conservatives, the institutes directors had always insisted on remaining unaffiliated with any of the major British political parties—leaving an opening for the creation of another organization that would specifically supply Tory policy makers with ideas. Joseph, who had served with Thatcher in the Heath government, became increasingly dissatisfied with the British situation in the 1970s, and he vowed to mix things up. He found his opportunity in 1974, when Heath, now leader of the opposition once again, entrusted Joseph with the creation of a new Conservative Party think tank. Joseph took him at his word. He quickly turned the Center for Policy Studies into a place that aimed to challenge consensus politics—including those who defended it within his own party. Joseph saw the CPS as an arsenal of ideas for a future conservative revolution, happily subverting the received notion of the think tank as natural left-wing territory. “What Britain needs is more millionaires and more bankrupts,” Joseph famously declared.14 This was provocation of the first sort, and Joseph and his followers knew it. Yet they spread the word with the insurgent zeal of the student disciples of Mao and Che (from whom, evidently, they had learned a thing or two about the seductions of revolutionary style). He chose Alfred Sherman, a recovering socialist, as its first director. The IEA had tried to keep above the political fray. The CPS had no such scruples. Joseph was eager to assault the status quo, and he was happy to take on his own party in the process.15 This desire only intensified after his own bid for leadership collapsed—opening the way for his ally Thatcher to gain election as the party’s new leader. (She was, incidentally, one of the cofounders of the CPS.)
Joseph firmly believed in the power of ideology. “A gun is certainly powerful,” he told the Tory party conference in 1976, “but who controls the man with the gun? A man with an idea.”16 And Joseph was good at expressing what he believed. One of his most forceful programmatic exercises came in April 1976, in a famous lecture he gave at the CPS. It was called “Monetarism Is Not Enough”:
We were as a country in a transitional stage from world industrial primacy, and our need was in fact to adjust to new realities. The technological decline of our old staple industries, now having to face fierce competition from other countries, was not sufficiently off set by the growth of our new industries, particularly as depression and protection dramatically cut world trade. The response of government, industry, trades unions, advisers was to move rather to work-sharing cartels, rationalization and restrictive trade oligopolies than to modernization and competition.
In short, they tried to thwart change rather than smooth a path for it.17
The proper remedy, he said, was not just to impose limits on the monetary supply in accordance with the theory some called “monetarism”—a view that was gradually winning favor even among some Labourites, like Callaghan’s son-in-law Peter Jay, who did some work for the IEA—but to pursue a whole suite of measures that would get the government out of the business of economic micromanagement and restore space for entrepreneurship and commercial innovation. “Risk-taking has little appeal these days: the upward potential is small: the downward risk is almost unlimited,” Joseph noted. In a passage that sounded the death knell for years of Keynesian “fine-tuning” in Britain, he showed how rising government spending crowded out private investment and boosted inflation. While the resulting high taxes, dense regulation, and rising costs drove private firms out of business, public companies simply relied on the government to come to their aid—thus fueling even more spending and upward pressure on prices. The “inflationary spiral” that Joseph described came to be known as the “ratchet effect,” and it offered up a devastatingly convincing picture of Britain’s economic situation.
It was a vision that Thatcher undoubtedly shared. It is true enough that her understanding of academic economics was limited (but this applies to many politicians). Her economic thinking emerged organically from her firmly held notions of patriotism, thrift, and individual responsibility. But this should not be taken to mean that she lacked any deeper interest in economic ideas. After the fall of the Heath government, she avidly consumed the work produced by Joseph’s CPS, and she actively solicited its recommendations (and those of the IEA) during her time as leader of the opposition. Along the way she rediscovered the work of Hayek, whom she had first read during the war, and became a convert to the monetarist theories of Milton Friedman, who rejected Keynes with a decisiveness that was just beginning to resonate among the English-speaking political elite. These were the main purveyors of what came to be known as the “market revolution” of the 1980s and 1990s—although, of course, their works actually constituted a reaction to the ideas of the socialists and the “Keynesian Revolution.”
Again, this body of thought was not new. But instead of asking what thinkers like Hayek and Friedman gave to Thatcher, we might be better off turning the question around: what did she do for their ideas? The answer soon revealed itself. What Thatcher contributed to the cause of the free marketeers was the unstinting force of her convictions. Ordinary politicians had programs. The grocer’s daughter had a mission.