There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  According to a poll conducted in 2005, only 36 percent of French citizens support the free-enterprise system. In Germany, 47 percent of the population claims to embrace socialist ideals.274 Chancellor Angela Merkel, once described as Germany’s Thatcher, has abandoned plans for free-market reforms. She has instead imposed new taxes and restrictions on the labor market. She has promised new efforts to “regulate” globalization.

  American academics remain enthralled by socialism. You will not find many college students wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts, but Che Guevara T-shirts are campus favorites. Socialism is the real message of the anti-globalization movement: The forces Thatcher confronted are one and the same as the forces that in 1999 led to the imposition of martial law in Seattle.

  I live in Istanbul, and I am regularly asked by concerned Americans whether secularism in Turkey is under threat. Do I fear, they ask, that the Turkish government has fallen under the control of Islamic crypto-fundamentalists? My standard answer to this question is that this is a legitimate concern, but so far I am not excessively alarmed. In fact, the only political violence I’ve seen here has nothing to do with Islam. On May Day 2008, just as I was finishing this book, the Turkish security forces used tear gas and water cannons to prevent crowds of trade unionists, communists, and anarchists from marching to Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Turkey’s three main trade union confederations, which bitterly oppose the government’s efforts to implement free-market reforms, claimed to have mobilized half a million marchers. The demonstrators showed up with gas masks and Molotov cocktails, throwing rocks at the police. The police beat them indiscriminately. They fired gas bombs into the crowd and shot water cannons into the trade union headquarters. Hundreds were arrested. Dozens were injured. I was proofreading the chapter of this book titled “I Hate Communists” when the police chased some 500 wet, coughing communists right down the street in front of me.275

  This conflict, even more than the divide between religion and secularism, will be the fault line of the coming century. How could it not be? It has been the fault line of political life since the French Revolution.

  I cannot promise it (remember Chiang!), but I do strongly suspect that Margaret Thatcher’s ideas and personality will assume an even greater significance with time. Recognizing what she achieved in Britain—and coolly appraising the cost of these victories, which was considerable—is as essential for our generation as for hers. Every society confronting these historical forces will inevitably arrive at a place much like the one Margaret Thatcher found herself upon her ascent to 10 Downing Street.

  She perceived these forces, and for a time she mastered them. This is why she matters to history.

  These forces are still at work; they must again be mastered.

  This is why she matters to you.

  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.

  PHOTOGRAPH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The photographer Graham Wiltshire and the family of the photographer Srdja Djukanovic permitted me to reproduce the photographs in this book simply because they are generous and for no other reason. I acknowledge their remarkable kindness to me with special gratitude.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I extend a lifetime of gratitude to a prince among archivists, Andrew Riley, the ever-patient, ever-droll, ever-helpful, ever-tactful Thatcher Papers Archivist and Public Services Manager at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge. I am more indebted to him than anyone who has not written a book about Margaret Thatcher could possibly understand. For his efforts, Andrew would in a just world receive from me bouquets of hothouse orchids, magnums of champagne, crates of chocolate truffles, tins of Beluga caviar, a solid-gold watch, a month-long vacation in the Caribbean, and my firstborn child. Over the past year I’ve asked Andrew a billion questions (more or less) about the documents he lovingly curates. He has patiently and learnedly answered every one of them, usually within minutes. He introduced me to many of the men and women I interviewed, spent hours helping me find and secure the rights to all the photos in this book (and did so at the very last minute, without a w
ord of complaint), and read every word I wrote, in multiple drafts. I suspect there is nothing he would not do to help a researcher. I implore others never to take advantage of his good will as I have.

  Andrew tsked-tsked (very tactfully) when he came across passages that he found insufficiently respectful of Margaret Thatcher or her friends. The concern in his voice when he said, “She might not like that!” was touching and a great tribute to the loyalty Margaret Thatcher inspires. I hope she appreciates that in Andrew, she has a servant as hardworking and energetic as she is, and as devoted to her as she deserves. I can promise her that any word in this book that displeases her remains despite Andrew’s strenuous objections. Many words were removed as a result of them.

  I’d also like to thank Andrew’s colleague Sophie Bridges, who spent many hours combing through the archives in search of the perfect photos for me.

  Then there is Chris Collins, editor of the official Web site of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. The site, www.margaretthatcher.org, is the most useful resource of its kind I’ve seen, all thanks to his industry and energy. There is far more material about Ronald Reagan on this site, for example, than on the Reagan Library’s and Foundation’s sites put together. I could not have written this book while living in Istanbul without Chris’s determination to make these documents available to researchers around the world. Chris too went far beyond the call of duty in answering questions, reading draft material, granting me the rights to use the material I cite from the Foundation archives, and helping me to make the book generally better. I thank him gratefully.

  I suspect that my editor, Bill Frucht, may be a man of the Left. He has hinted as much in our phone conversations. Nonetheless, he acquired this book and gave me the freedom to say precisely what I wished to say, proof of his admirable intellectual confidence and tolerance. Bill has been particularly kind to me personally. When I signed the contract for this book the dollar was strong. By the time I finished it, it was not. Having just written a spirited defense of free markets operating in the context of robust contract law, I could hardly make an intellectually credible case to Bill that he should give me more money simply because I didn’t have enough of it. All the same, I didn’t have enough of it. Bill found a creative way to interpret our contract and to cut my advance check ahead of the stipulated date. “The free market,” he wrote to me, “does not always yield the optimal solution. Unless it’s balanced by reason and compassion, it can, like any machine or algorithm, go off course.” Given the circumstances, these struck me as remarks of godlike sagacity. I hereby qualify this book with his wise words. If only everyone who was tempted to tamper with the free market possessed his reason and his compassion.

  I extend my thanks as well to my industrious production editor, Annie Lenth, whom readers must imagine as this book’s drill sergeant, responsible for maintaining good unit order and discipline. I also thank my meticulous copy editor, Antoinette Smith.

  My friends Damian Counsell, Norah Vincent, Kristen Erickson, Judith Wrubel-Levy, Martin Davies, Bill Walsh, Elizabeth Pisani, Justin Hintzen, Zia Rahman, and David Gross all read chapters or full drafts of this book, in some cases several drafts, and every one of them made it better. Zia, in particular, devoted days to the manuscript while visiting Istanbul, setting aside his own work to do so. I am lucky to have friends like these.

  As always, my father and brother were my unofficial collaborators. I particularly thank my brother for calling me one evening to say, “You know what you should write, Claire? A book about Margaret Thatcher.” And I thank my father, as always, for showing me how it should be done.

  It hardly needs to be said—but I will say it anyway—that I am grateful to my mother and my stepfather for their unfailing support.

  The people I interviewed in this book were extraordinarily generous with me. They were to the last gracious about my questions, even when less good-humored subjects might have thrown me out of their homes or offices. I hope that it is clear that even when I did not agree with them, I had a wonderful time with each and every one of them. I would especially like to thank Brian Lewis for his superb hospitality in Yorkshire and for his wonderful gifts of Thatcher memorabilia and books about the miners’ strike, which I treasure. I’d also like to convey my affection and gratitude to Andrew Graham, the Master of Balliol, not only for his help with this book but for his warmth and patience with me when I was his student.

  A number of people who were close to Margaret Thatcher spoke to me off the record, and in doing so greatly helped me to form a more complete mental picture of her. I thank them all for their time and insight.

  For all the reasons I’ve named in this book, the world owes Margaret Thatcher a great debt. Historians are more indebted to her still. Lady Thatcher was under no obligation to give her personal papers to anyone. Indeed, she could have sold them to the highest bidder or burnt them had she thought it prudent. She instead donated them to the British people. This is proof of the depth of her commitment to the ideal of an open society, not to mention an extraordinary testimony to her confidence in her own character. You do not hand over to historians and journalists 3,000 boxes of papers, many of which you have not seen since the day they crossed your desk, if you are not certain that you have always conducted yourself with irreproachable integrity. Think about it: Would you?

  A final word for my agent, Daniel Greenberg. For reasons that will be obvious to him, I acknowledge his work on my behalf with particularly profound feeling. No words are quite adequate to express what needs to be said, so I will choose the simplest ones. Thank you, Daniel. Not a day has passed when you have not been in my thoughts.

  A GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

  The scholarly literature about Thatcher and Thatcherism is vast. I’ve not endeavored here to provide a complete guide to it. These are merely a few suggestions for readers who are now on fire to deepen their acquaintance with Thatcher and her epoch.

  If you’re looking for a more traditional biography of Margaret Thatcher, John Campbell’s two volumes are the gold standard. The Grocer’s Daughter covers the years from 1925 to 1979. The Iron Lady treats her life until 2003. I particularly recommend the first seven chapters of The Grocer’s Daughter. This is an unauthorized biography, but Campbell has received excellent cooperation from the key players.

  Charles Moore, formerly the editor of the Daily Telegraph, is now working on Thatcher’s authorized biography. He has had access to all of her papers. No one else has. His book will be published upon her death. I would say that I cannot wait to read it, but given what this implies, I would prefer to wait for a very long while.

  Thatcher’s memoirs—again, two volumes—are wonderful. The Path to Power treats her life until 1979; The Downing Street Years covers her premiership. If you have time for only one, read The Downing Street Years. Critics have been snotty about her memoirs, as indeed they are snotty about her generally, but they are snotty for no reason: These books are lively, revealing, arch, wise, and beautifully written. Also invaluable is Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, her treatise on international affairs.

  As for other memoirs of this period, no one should shuffle off this mortal coil before reading Alan Clark’s diaries. There are three volumes: Into Politics, In Power, and The Last Diaries. I’m not sure that you’ll come away from them with a much deeper understanding of Margaret Thatcher, but you’ll certainly better understand the environment in which she was obliged to maneuver. (Clark describes Michael Heseltine, for example, as the kind of person “who bought his own furniture”—a remark from which an entire book about the British class structure could be derived.)

  The View from No. 11, by Nigel Lawson, is the most important memoir of economic policymaking during this period. No one ever wished it longer, but you’ll have no further questions about the Exchange Rate Mechanism dispute after you finish it.

  Although it is now hard to come by, I also recommend John Hoskyns’s diary, Just in Time: Inside the Thatcher Revolution. Shrewd,
detailed, and too rarely read. On Thatcherism as an ideology, Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Anatomy of Thatcherism is unusually sophisticated and interesting.

  If you’d like to know more about Arthur Scargill, Paul Routledge has written an excellent eponymous biography. It is of course unauthorized. Scargill is apparently now preparing his own autobiography. I expect his perspective on the miners’ strike will be different from mine.

  For the Falklands, nothing comes close to Sir Lawrence Freedman’s two-volume Official History of the Falklands War. It’s the best, most thoroughly sourced, and most comprehensive work extant on the subject.

  On Thatcher’s role in the Cold War, I suggest John O’Sullivan’s book, The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. I would argue that the book should have had half as much pope and twice as much prime minister, but in O’Sullivan’s defense, he has already written a great deal for and about Margaret Thatcher. He was her speechwriter and subsequently played a large hand in the writing of her memoirs.

  For a sturdy academic account of Thatcher’s economic policy, try Mrs. Thatcher’s Economic Experiment by William Keegan. It is accessible but critical. Martin Holmes’s The First Thatcher Government is somewhat more sympathetic. David Smith’s From Boom to Bust deals with the later period. Robert Skidelsky’s anthology, Thatcherism, contains a useful selection of essays about her economic policies, both for and against.

  The Margaret Thatcher Foundation offers free access to thousands upon thousands of source documents on its Web site, as well as many interesting photos and video clips. If you are at all curious about this epoch, you’ll pass many happy hours there. Likewise, if you’re seeking a comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography, check there. The Foundation is preparing one right now. It will probably be ready by the time you read this.