Margaret Thatcher’s world view was formed by the fight against Hitler. Now her generation has finally left the stage
This column appeared on the day of Lady Thatcher’s funeral.
Margaret Thatcher did not like holidays. She was pleased, therefore, to learn that the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was having his vacation close to hers. Good. She could get some work done.
Chancellor Kohl was not happy to be interrupted. Especially by her. But he felt he had no alternative but to agree to see the British Prime Minister. All right, he said, let’s have a holiday meeting, and he turned up in his hiking shorts. She, of course, was in full battledress complete with capacious handbag.
After enough small talk to make Herr Kohl feel he had done his diplomatic duty, Mrs Thatcher said something like ‘Right, let’s get started’ and reached into her bag and pulled out a stack of papers. The Chancellor went slightly pale and mumbled that, erm, he was awfully sorry but he had another important meeting scheduled.
So it was that Mrs Thatcher was left wandering – more of a sort of brisk trot really – with her advisers around a small holiday village at a total loose end. And so it was that her advisers spotted Helmut Kohl sitting all by himself in a cafe consuming a large cake.
The dreadful relationship between these two giants of politics, Kohl and Thatcher, can partly be explained by differences in temperament and partly by differences in ideology (while both were on the right, Chancellor Kohl would often emphasise in his speeches that he was a Christian democrat and not a conservative). But the best way of understanding it is the way to understand so much about Margaret Thatcher. The explanation is generational. This story that seems to be about holidays and cake is really about the Second World War.
Today, with gun carriage and muffled bells, Britain marks the passing of a generation. And Baroness Thatcher’s funeral can perhaps, even by those who cannot reconcile themselves to her, be celebrated like that as a moment of national importance.
Mrs Thatcher was the last in a long procession of prime ministers who were born before the Second World War began, experienced it as an adult and allowed it to shape their politics. Churchill, Attlee, Churchill again, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Wilson again, Callaghan; the line ends with her.
Born in 1925, a wartime volunteer, a student contemporary of returning soldiers, politically active as early as 1935, married to an army captain ten years older who was mentioned twice in dispatches, Mrs Thatcher was, unlike those who came after her, a product of the fight against Hitler. In her memoirs she explains that it was infrequently understood how deeply the war had affected people like her.
The political battle that came to a head in the 1980s was, above all else, about how to understand the lessons taught by the war. Did it teach, as so many believed, that the state must summon up the spirit of collective endeavour in peace and that planning was the future? Or that there was something special about the British people, as she believed, who must resist the sort of collectivism that produced fascism and Stalinism?
The socialist politician and economist Douglas Jay is famous for his extraordinary statement that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’. Less well known is that he preceded this with the words ‘housewives as a whole cannot be trusted to buy all the right things’.
Immediately after the war, the Conservative Party rallied the housewife against the gentleman in Whitehall, became the party of the consumer against the party of the rationer and the producer. Margaret Thatcher’s personal style, her clothes, her way of talking about the economy of the nation as if it was a household budget, are best seen as part of this.
Mrs Thatcher’s role as the Iron Lady in the Cold War also resulted from her view of the battle against Hitler. She saw herself, quite explicitly, as avoiding the mistake of the Munich Agreement. In fact, more than that, she saw herself as eradicating the stain it had left. In 1990 when she addressed the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly, at last free again, she told members how she felt we had failed them and remembered 1938 with shame.
Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl came from the same generation, old enough to experience the war, but with no experience of fighting in it. This meant that both saw the balance of power in Europe as the very greatest of issues. But it also produced two very different attitudes. For Kohl, the most important task in politics was to heal the scars of his youth. Germany should be reunited itself and should then create a united Europe in which Germany would be bound, unable once again to dominate or threaten the continent.
Mrs Thatcher also wanted to heal the scars of her youth – by never allowing Germany to assert itself, reunite or create a strong European federation in which it dominated.
After Mrs Thatcher fell – in fact, come to think of it, perhaps it was even the cause of her fall – the terms of reference in politics changed. The baby boomers took over: John Major, born in 1943, was at its very starting edge. The framework was set by the social revolution of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the 1980s (Mrs Thatcher’s multiple election victories and the failure of socialism having settled the argument).
Many of the disputes that absorbed Mrs Thatcher’s generation – should homosexuality be legal? Should the Government try to set supermarket prices? – now seem bizarre and the language and style antiquated. They are settled, over, done.
So today we are paying tribute to more than just a person, someone who was remarkable, and angular, and magnificent and difficult and even (to some, if not to me) terrible. We are paying tribute to an age and those who dominated it.
To those who fought the war or lived through it and came to create the peace.
I was recently 50 years old and on my birthday I reflected that all the luck that had deserted my parents and my grandparents in their youth had fallen to me. For I have lived my whole life in this great country, in the peace and stability that it offers its citizens.
And today I will think not just of Margaret Thatcher but of all those great prime ministers in that line, all of them in that extraordinary war generation. And, even though it is a Christian service and I am not a Christian, I will find myself, quietly, saying a prayer of thanks.