For seventy years Mrs Thatcher’s health had been extraordinarily good. She had suffered from colds, from one or two specific conditions like varicose veins and Dupuytren’s contracture which had required minor operations, and increasingly from problems with her teeth. But considering the demands she had made on her constitution for the past forty years, it had held up astonishingly well. In so-called retirement she still got up early and kept herself busy all day, still exhausted her staff by her relentless schedule on foreign trips.Yet eventually the Iron Lady did begin to show signs of metal fatigue.While speaking in Chile in 1994 she suddenly lost consciousness and slumped forward onto the lectern. She quickly recovered, and apologised profusely to her hosts for her uncharacteristic moment of weakness; but this was probably her first very minor stroke.60
The most visible sign of frailty over the next few years was a loss of short-term memory. She began to repeat herself and seemed not to take in what was said to her. So long as she had a script, she remained a true professional who could still turn in a faultless performance. But off-script she could be a liability, either too predictable – simply repeating lines she had used a thousand times before, sometimes just a minute earlier – or else alarmingly unpredictable. Denis or whoever was minding her at the time had to be skilled at nudging the needle on at the right moment. It was in Madeira, where she and Denis had gone to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary at the end of 2001, that she suffered a second minor stroke. Sometime early in 2002 she had a third, as a result of which it was announced on 22 March that she would do no more public speaking. But not before she had exploded one last bombshell with the serialisation of her latest book.
Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World was neither a third volume of memoirs, though it had autobiographical elements, nor – as its title might suggest – an instruction manual in the art of government. Rather, it was a survey of the international scene at the start of the new millennium, comprising Lady Thatcher’s view of how things had been allowed to slide since 1990 and what should now be done to put them right. Every few pages her prescription was summarised in four or five bullet points printed in bold type. The book was dedicated to Ronald Reagan ‘to whom the world owes so much’: its central message was contempt for the woolly internationalism of the ‘new world order’ and the importance of American global leadership. She seemed almost to welcome the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 as a vindication of her previous warnings, and positively looked forward to the Americans hitting back decisively and unilaterally:
So far…I am heartened by the fact that President Bush seems to have concluded that this is an American operation and that America alone will decide how it is to be conducted… That means taking out the terrorists and their protectors, and not just in Afghanistan but elsewhere too.61[r]
Did she recall that she had once been a strong upholder of international law who had criticised unilateral American action in Grenada, warned Reagan against retaliation against Libya and opposed carrying the Gulf war all the way to Baghdad without UN authority? Or that she had long argued that nuclear weapons helped preserve the peace and practically defined a country’s sovereignty? Now, faced with the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, she wrote that she ‘certainly would not rule out pre-emptive strikes to destroy a rogue state’s capabilities’63 – while at the same time she dismissed ‘pointless protests about India’s or Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities’.64 Now it all depended on whether it was America’s friends or enemies who had the weapons.
Other chapters dealt with Europe’s feeble response to the disintegration of Yugoslavia; her high hopes of China, Hong Kong, India and Asia generally; rather more cautious optimism about Russia; and a somewhat muted restatement of her belief that Israel must eventually be persuaded to trade ‘land for peace’ to secure a just settlement in the Middle East. Most controversial, however, was her latest and definitive blast against the European Union, in which she finally laid bare the gut conviction which had underlain her attitude to the Continent all her life. ‘During my lifetime’, she declared, ‘most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it.’65 Of course she was thinking primarily, as always, of the Second World War. But it applied also to the Cold War: Communism was the problem, America the solution.
The European Community, she had concluded, was ‘fundamentally unreformable’. It was ‘an empire in the making… the ultimate bureaucracy’, founded on ‘humbug’; inherently protectionist, intrinsically corrupt, essentially undemocratic and dedicated to the destruction of nation-states. ‘It is in fact a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure.’66 That being so, she called for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s membership and, if that failed – as it was bound to do – for Britain to be ready to withdraw and join the North American Free Trade Area instead, turning its back on the whole disastrous folly into which Ted Heath had led the country in 1973.
This sensational démarche was serialised in The Times, starting on 18 March. This time the consensus was clear, right across the political spectrum, that she had finally lost touch with reality. Several of her most loyal supporters, including leading Eurosceptics like Michael Howard, were quick to distance themselves. A poll of constituency party chairmen found 71 per cent rejecting Lady Thatcher’s view. ‘I love her to death,’ the chairman of North East Hampshire Conservatives told The Times, ‘but she’s gone too far. We do not tolerate extremists and she has gone into the extremist bracket.’ ‘She has a special place in Conservative Party history,’ echoed another. ‘What she did for this country was something we should be proud of. But times have moved on… She should gracefully take a step back and let those in charge get on with it.’67
The very next day she caught the press off guard by doing exactly that. Having dominated the media all week with her views, she announced on Friday that she had been advised by her doctors to cancel all her scheduled speaking engagements and accept no more. ‘SILENCED’ ran the headlines from the Daily Mail to the Sun. The weekend papers were filled with retrospectives of her career, picture spreads, memorable sayings and virtual obituaries which proclaimed that this was the end of the story. Some commentators doubted if she would really be able to contain herself, since ‘the sound of silence and Lady Thatcher are not natural allies’.68 No one pointed out that she had only forsworn public speaking, and that she had sparked the latest uproar without uttering a word. Nevertheless, there was universal agreement that it was the end of an era.
Her three strokes, rather than memory loss, were given as the reason, though clearly the two were connected. She did in fact continue to make public appearances. In October 2002 she attended the opening of the new Archives Centre, built to house her papers at Churchill College, Cambridge, to which the Thatcher Foundation had contributed £5 million. And she continued to issue brief statements on current events – praising Blair’s ‘bold and effective’ leadership in the war on Iraq, for instance, but at the same time accusing New Labour of ‘reverting to Old Labour with its irresponsible policies of tax and spend’.69 She could not quite give up the habit of a lifetime. But essentially she had now finally retired.
In 2003 Denis died, which added further to her confusion. For more than half a century he had been her rock and without him she was lost. It was now generally known that she was suffering – like Ronald Reagan – from Alzheimer’s disease, and she slipped progressively from public view, cared for by a loyal bodyguard of old friends and devoted staff. In 2008 Carol published another book in which she spelled out – rather unnecessarily in many eyes – the extent of her mother’s dementia. Even in her twilight state, however, her capacity to arouse controversy remained undimmed. On becoming Prime Minister in July 2007, Gordon Brown followed Tony Blair’s example ten years earlier by inviting LadyThatcher to tea in Downing Street. She was s
aid to be pleased to be asked back to her old domain and posed happily for pictures on the doorstep; but both Labour and Tory supporters were outraged by Brown trying to exploit her reputation for his own political ends. Paradoxically, even as Brown embraced her, David Cameron was still trying to distance the Tories from her legacy. (‘There is such a thing as society’, he insisted. ‘It’s just not the same thing as the state.’)70 When her statue was erected in the lobby of the House of Commons in 2002 a protester decapitated it with an iron bar; then in 2008 it leaked out that plans were in hand to give her a state funeral – an honour last accorded to Churchill in 1965. It was as if she was no longer a living person but had already passed into history, a semi-mythical icon whose mantle was simultaneously claimed and rejected by both parties.
The debate will be joined in earnest when she finally joins the pantheon of departed leaders. Margaret Thatcher was not merely the first woman and the longest-serving Prime Minister of modern times, but the most admired, most hated, most idolised and most vilified public figure of the second half of the twentieth century. To some she was the saviour of her country who ‘put the Great back into Great Britain’ after decades of decline;71 the dauntless warrior who curbed the unions, routed the wets, reconquered the Falklands, rolled back the state and created a vigorous enterprise economy which twenty years later was still outperforming the more regulated economies of the Continent. To others, she was a narrow ideologue whose hard-faced policies legitimised greed, deliberately increased inequality by favouring the middle class at the expense of an excluded underclass, starved the public services, wrecked the universities, prostituted public broadcasting and destroyed the nation’s sense of solidarity and civic pride. There is no reconciling these views: yet both are true.
A third view would argue that she achieved much less than she and her admirers claim: that for all her boasts on one side, and the howls of ‘Tory cuts’ on the other, she actually failed to curb public spending significantly, failed to prune or privatise the welfare state, failed to change most of the British people’s fundamental attitudes, but rather extended Whitehall’s detailed control of many areas of national life, shrank freedom where she claimed to be enhancing it, downgraded Parliament and pioneered a style of presidential government which was developed still further by Tony Blair. Nor did she raise Britain’s influence in the world. On the contrary, by binding the country more firmly than ever to the United States and refusing to engage constructively with Britain’s opportunity in Europe, she repeated the historic error which kept Britain outside the European Union in its formative phase, perpetuating its ambivalent semi-isolation. This may prove in the long run her most damaging legacy.
There remains the question of how far Margaret Thatcher, as an individual, inspired and drove the policies that bore her name, or to what extent she simply rode a global wave of anti-collectivism and technological revolution which would have changed British society in most of the same ways, whoever had been in power. What she undeniably did was to articulate the new materialistic individualism with a clarity and moral fervour which appeared to win the argument by sheer force of personality, even when the reality was less radical than the rhetoric. She was not a creative or consistent thinker. There were huge contradictions between her belief in free markets and liberal economics, on the one hand, and her flagrant partiality to her own class and her increasingly strident English nationalism on the other. But that was not the point. She was a brilliantly combative, opportunist politician who, by a mixture of hard work, stamina, self-belief and uncanny instinct, bullied an awestruck country into doing things her way for more than a decade. Above all she was a tremendous performer, who raised genuine passions on both sides of the political divide which have been sadly absent in the bland, spin-doctored days since her departure. She may have achieved less than she claimed, but she still accomplished much that was necessary and overdue. Today the whole culture of incomes policies, subsidies and social contracts – and the double-digit inflation that made them seem inescapable – seems so remote that it is easy to forget how much courage was required in 1979 – 81 to set about dismantling it. The courage was not hers alone; but she was the leader. Ultimately the balance sheet will demand a judgement as to whether the benefits of that economic and cultural revolution outweighed the social cost.
Up till 2008 it was widely accepted that Thatcherism had not only restored the British economy but – hand in hand with Reaganism in the United States – set the template for the development of the world economy for the foreseeable future. Free market capitalism had triumphed all round the world, socialism was a discredited memory, and ever-growing prosperity was assumed to be infinitely assured on a tide of financial ingenuity and deregulated credit. While a few wise voices warned that the boom was founded on a confidence trick, the Labour governments of Blair and Brown bought into this dangerous optimism, partly because they too were carried away by it, but partly also because they could not be seen to stand against it. ‘New Labour’ regained power in 1997 precisely by accepting the Thatcher revolution, and its continued dominance over the next decade depended on leaving the Tories no political space to their right. The 2008 ‘credit crunch’ – directly caused by the irresponsible lending of deregulated banks and other financial institutions in Britain and the United States – shattered this optimism and plunged the whole world into the worst recession since the 1930s. On the one hand this devastating collapse was specifically the failure of the Reagan/Thatcher model of ‘light-touch’ regulation which encouraged the pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of long-term security. On the other, the measures adopted on both sides of the Atlantic to salvage the situation – by the outgoing Republican administration in Washington as much as by Brown’s Labour government in Britain, as well as by all the economies of the European Union and most of the rest of the world – resurrected almost overnight – with astonishingly little hesitation or opposition – all those discredited ‘socialist’ solutions which were thought to have been forsworn for ever: ‘rescuing’ the banks with large sums of taxpayers’ money (stopping barely short of outright nationalisation) and pumping further large injections of borrowed money into the economy to try to maintain demand. Crude Keynesianism – which Thatcherism was supposed to have buried for ever – was suddenly resurgent, to the great glee of all those old socialists who had never in their hearts abandoned their hankering for state control. Now it was untrammelled capitalism which seemed to have imploded, with banks and building societies running to the state to be saved from the consequences of their own folly.
Seeking scapegoats, some in the media blamed Mrs Thatcher personally. Her defenders pointed out that she had always preached thrift, held that high remuneration should be the reward of hard work, not speculation, never owned a credit card and disapproved of the ‘casino culture’ of the City. One could even see the credit crunch as a spectacular vindication of her repeated warnings that ‘you cannot buck the market’. Nevertheless it was undeniable that her government, by detonating the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, had unleashed, perhaps unwittingly, all the consequences that flowed from deregulation of the financial sector, including the rocketing of house prices and a huge rise in household indebtedness as under-capitalised banks lent money they did not have to overmortgaged customers who could not repay it. She was, whether she liked it or not, the patron saint of the ‘loadsamoney’ culture, and when it collapsed it was inevitable, in the highly personalised world of modern politics, that she would be blamed, and her reputation as the saviour of British capitalism badly tarnished. Of course it was not just her government which inflated the bubble. One of Gordon Brown’s first acts on taking over the Treasury was to ease still further the framework of financial regulation; Peter Mandelson famously declared that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’;72 and for ten years Tony Blair’s overriding priority was to do everything necessary to retain the support of the City. But they were all operating within the climate created
by eighteen years of Thatcherism. It was a measure of how fundamentally she had transformed the political landscape that even a Chancellor with such deep ‘old Labour’ roots as Brown – who had made his reputation excoriating Thatcherism in the 1980s – felt obliged in office to press on with her revolution, carrying it to lengths of imprudence at which her innate caution would have baulked. Her influence lived on long after 1990; that was her great achievement. But when the world she had bequeathed crashed, her reputation necessarily suffered with it.
No doubt the world economy will recover, as the counter-cyclical measures taken by all the major national economies – with Barack Obama’s new Democrat administration in Washington in the lead – sooner or later take effect. ‘Socialism’ in the form that Mrs Thatcher banished it will not return. But there is bound to be a serious correction which will last for many years. The substantial stake which all Western governments have taken in their financial institutions will take time to unpick. Having had their fingers badly burned, the ideologues of the unregulated market will not be so arrogant – or so triumphalist again for a long time. Thus as the perspective on Margaret Thatcher’s career lengthens it becomes clearer than ever that history moves in cycles. The solutions of today become the problems of tomorrow. Margaret Thatcher played a bold part in wrenching Britain – and by her example much of the world – out of the failed path of economic planning and stifling state control. Over a period of nearly thirty years Thatcherism released a huge amount of economic energy, created a great deal of new wealth and delivered many social benefits – as well as some enduring costs. That it eventually had to be corrected in its turn will not detract in the long run from her historic importance. For better and worse, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham imprinted her personality, and her name, indelibly upon her era. She will always remain one of the transformative figures who shaped the twentieth century.
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