There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  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. K
innock: 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—”