ALWAYS

RIGHT
How Margaret Thatcher Saved Britain

By Niall Ferguson
 Preface

Historians of my generation were taught to despise the “great man theory of

history”. The Reformation had not been the work of Luther, Calvin or Henry
VIII, but of great social forces — the rising gentry, I seem to remember. The
English Civil War was not Oliver Cromwell’s triumph but the defeat of a
declining aristocracy. The reductio ad absurdum of this approach was the erudite
German professor who set out to write a history of the Third Reich without
mentioning Hitler.
By contrast, this little book is unapologetically based on the great woman
theory of history. I do not mean to argue that Margaret Thatcher was literally
“always right”. As we shall see, and as she herself had the courage to admit, she
was sometimes wrong. My point is that she was right much more often than her
critics. Moreover, she was usually right because of her conservative principles.
At a time when conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has lost that self-
confidence which it acquired in the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s passing
should prompt us to reflect on her achievement. Those who have had the bad
taste to celebrate her death will probably not read this book, not least because it
will remind them of just how wrong they were in the 1980s.
 1
PUNK TORIES

In a famous footnote, that least Tory of historians A.J.P. Taylor famously called
Winston Churchill “the saviour of his country”. Few of my generation of
historians would agree with me when I echo him in calling Margaret Thatcher
the saviour of her country. But she was — and her legion of left-wing academic
critics were just part of what she attempted to save Britain from.
It is easy to forget what Britain was like when Margaret Thatcher became
Prime Minister in May 1979. I was fifteen years old and the best way to describe
myself at that time is as a punk Tory. I was punk in the sense that my teenage
soul had been set ablaze by the Sex Pistols’ incendiary single “Anarchy in the
UK”, released not long after Thatcher had become the Tory leader, and by their
gloriously disrespectful “God Save the Queen”, which followed soon after:

God save the queen

Her fascist regime
They made you a moron
A potential H-bomb
God save the queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming

What made me and my friends leap around like lunatics to those words, snarled
by that pallid degenerate Johnny Rotten, was an intense frustration. We didn’t for
a moment think the Queen was a fascist or inhuman. We were just utterly and
completely fed up with post-war, post-Empire, post-Beatles Britain. In the late
Seventies, there really did seem to be “no future / in England’s dreaming”.
Nothing worked. The trains were always late. The payphones were always
broken (where I lived, they were mainly used as urinals). My first ever
publication was a letter to the Glasgow Herald complaining about the exploding
price of school shoes. The inflation rate when I wrote that letter in 1975 was 27
per cent. It was the worst inflation the country experienced in the entire
twentieth century — worse than in either of the world wars.
Worst of all were the recurrent strikes. Strikes by coalminers. Strikes by
dockers. Strikes by printers. Strikes by refuse collectors. Strikes even by
gravediggers. In the single month of September 1979, as the trade unions sought
to undermine the newly elected Conservative government, the number of days
lost to industrial action was nearly 12 million. (In September 2013, by
comparison, it was just 8,000.)
So I was a punk out of frustration. But I became a Tory out of hope. In
“Time for Truth”, another punk band of the time, The Jam, had the honesty
openly to blame the Labour Party: “I think it’s time for truth / And the truth is
you’ve lost, Uncle Jimmy” — an unmistakable reference to the avuncular
Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, whom Thatcher ousted in the 1979
election. Callaghan — whose nickname “Sunny Jim” became a bad joke in the
1978–79 “Winter of Discontent” — made our hearts sink.
On January 10, 1979, on his return from an economic summit held on the
sunny Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe, Sunny Jim was asked by a journalist:
“What is your general approach, in view of the mounting chaos in the country at
the moment?” Callaghan gave the kind of mealy-mouthed, patronizing answer
we were sick of hearing from politicians:

Well, that’s a judgment that you are making, and I promise you that if you
look at it from outside, and perhaps you’re taking rather a parochial view at
the moment, I don’t think that other people in the world would share the
view that there is mounting chaos.

At the end of the conference, he joked that he doubted he would “even find a cup
of coffee” if there was such mounting chaos. (It was true, we did have coffee at
airports in 1979 — disgusting instant stuff.) This show of insouciance did not go
down well with the British press. The front page of the following day’s Sun
newspaper bore the immortal headline: “CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?”
By contrast, Thatcher — rather to our surprise, it must be said — gave us
hope. And part of the reason was her refusal to give answers like Callaghan’s.
“My job is to stop Britain going red,” she had declared in November 1977. This
refreshing directness was a very large part of her appeal. Yes, of course, her
policies were a vast improvement on the dismal mix of corporatism and
stagflation that had gone before. But what made Thatcherism so impressive to a
young punk like me was Thatcher’s own aggressiveness. Yes, there was a streak
of punk in her, too — in the way she gloried in confrontation, right to the very
end of her eleven years in power.
As early as 1975 she had come up with a wonderful line about the Labour
Party: “They’ve got the usual Socialist disease — they’ve run out of other
people’s money.” This she contrasted memorably with what she called “the
British inheritance”: “A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns,
to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master … They are the
essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.”
It was Hayek armed with a swinging handbag, and I loved it.
Once in power, defiance was her forte. “There really is no alternative,” she
declared in June 1980, a line that was soon shortened to the acronym TINA. “To
those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn,
I have only this to say,” she told the Tory Party Conference in October 1980:
“You turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.”
Like a true punk, Thatcher loved a fight. “Oh, but you know,” she said in a
1984 TV interview, “you do not achieve anything without trouble, ever.” And
she could put the boot in to lethal effect. “The trouble with you John,” she told a
wavering back-bencher in her last, desperate days in office, “is that your spine
does not reach your brain.” That was a condition from which a great many
Britons suffered in the late 1970s. But not Margaret Thatcher.
 2
THINK TANKS AND HACKS

Most intellectuals detested Margaret Thatcher. It is important nevertheless to

recognize that Thatcherism was a theory before it was a policy and owed a
considerable debt to the minority of intellectuals who took her side.
Thatcher herself was neither an economist nor a political theorist. At Oxford
she studied chemistry; later she studied law and qualified as a barrister. As an
ambitious young politician she certainly read Friedrich Hayek’s Road to
Serfdom, but she later admitted not to have “grasped [its] implications”. True, as
her party’s spokeswoman on housing in the mid-1960s, she advocated the sale of
council houses to tenants and opposed the Labour government’s price and
income controls, as well as its excessively high taxation. But as Education
Secretary under Edward Heath she made no serious effort to resist the
transformation of schools into comprehensives, a disastrous socialist experiment
intended to destroy precisely the kind of grammar school she herself had
attended. She acquiesced in most of Heath’s blunders, the worst of which was
abandonment of trade union reform. She was even willing to condone his hare-
brained scheme to impose a maximum mortgage rate.
Margaret Thatcher was, after all, an ambitious woman. To have aligned
herself with the more ideological figures to Heath’s right — such as Enoch
Powell — would have been fatal to her career. (Powell himself was wary of her,
commenting shortly after her elevation to the leadership: “If you are looking for
somebody to pick up principles trampled in the mud, the place to look is not
among the tramplers.”) For most of the 1970s, the Right were figures of fun. In
an episode of the popular television series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin,
which aired on the BBC between 1976 and 1979, the central character asks his
Tory brother-in-law: “So come on, Jimmy, who are you going to fight when this
balloon of yours goes up?”

Jimmy: Forces of anarchy: wreckers of law and order. Communists, Maoists,

Trotskyists, neo-Trotskyists, crypto-Trotskyists, union leaders, Communist
union leaders, atheists, agnostics, long-haired weirdos, short-haired weirdos,
 vandals, hooligans, football supporters, namby-pamby probation officers,
rapists, papists, papist rapists, foreign surgeons — headshrinkers, who ought
to be locked up, Wedgwood Benn, keg bitter, punk rock, glue-sniffers, Play
For Today, squatters, Clive Jenkins, Roy Jenkins, Up Jenkins, up
everybody’s, Chinese restaurants — why do you think Windsor Castle is
ringed with Chinese restaurants?

Reggie: You realise the sort of people you're going to attract, don’t you
Jimmy? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards,
sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-
bashers, anybody-bashers, Rear Admirals, queer Admirals, Vice-Admirals,
fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists, neo-loyalists, crypto-
loyalists.

Jimmy: Do you really think so? I thought support might be difficult.

In this kind of climate, to be anything other than a centrist was to court ridicule.
Yet the stakes were lower in the shadowy world of think tanks. The Institute
of Economic Affairs had been set up as early as 1955 to make the case for free
market economics. Its leading lights, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, played an
important part in the economic education of Margaret Thatcher. Even more
important was the Centre for Policy Studies, set up in 1974 under Keith Joseph
and Alfred Sherman. In his role as Thatcher’s John the Baptist, Joseph delivered
and published a series of lectures, of which “Monetarism is Not Enough” was
perhaps the most important, arguing as it did not only for monetary tightening
but also for cuts in public spending. As Vice-Chairman of the CPS, Thatcher was
transformed from a Heathite “trampler” into a free market evangelist. Her speech
to the Zurich Economic Society in March 1977 was co-authored by Sherman and
epitomized her new style:

The tide is beginning to turn against collectivism … and this turn is rooted in
a revulsion against the sour fruit of socialist experience. The tide flows away
from failure. But it will not automatically float us to our desired destination
… It is up to us to give intellectual content and political direction … If we
fail, the tide will be lost. But if it is taken, the last quarter of our century can
initiate a new renaissance matching anything in our island’s long and
outstanding history.
It would be a mistake, however, to see the intellectual prelude to Thatcherism as
a purely economic affair. In Cambridge, the historians of the Peterhouse School
had for long, dark years tenaciously defended High Toryism against Communists
and Keynesians alike. Maurice Cowling encouraged his students to be “against
the higher liberalism and all sorts of liberal rhetoric ... and in favour of irony,
geniality and malice as solvents of enthusiasm, virtue and political elevation”.
He, along with Michael Bentley, Alistair Cooke, Edward Norman and John
Vincent, shaped the minds of a generation of young Tories, many of whom —
like Michael Portillo — went on to serve as Thatcherites in Parliament or the
media. Other heroes of the time were the philosopher Roger Scruton, whose
editorship of the Salisbury Review established a bastion for politically incorrect
thought, and the Byronic historian Norman Stone, whose protégés were
encouraged to see for themselves the depravity of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.
In Oxford, Thatcher’s alma mater, which would later disown her, the
number of Conservative dons could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But,
with the encouragement of the historian Jeremy Catto, I and other young
Thatcherites would gather at meetings of the Canning Club to drink cheap claret
and listen to precocious papers. It was not only the parlous condition of the
British economy that brought us together. It was also, lest we forget, the Cold
War. More than anything else — more even than the question of trade union
power — it was Labour’s commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament that
rendered them unelectable in the Eighties, simultaneously united “Wets” and
“Dries” within the Tory Party, while driving foreign policy realists to secede
from Labour and form the Social Democratic Party.
To be a Thatcherite student in the early Eighties — we were a small,
obnoxious band — was to adore the Cold War. I still recall the drinks party a
friend at Balliol threw to celebrate the deployment of Cruise missiles. The
invitation featured a picture of a bottle of Bollinger with a mushroom cloud
rising from the neck. Even the library suggestions book at Magdalen College
was a small but active front in the Cold War. Every time the college’s resident
Marxist recommended a book on Class and Hegemony in the Prison Diaries of
Gramsci, we would counter with The Collected Limericks of Nicolae and Elena
Ceausescu. The joy of this kind of thing was that the Left always rose to the bait,
no matter how puerile. We were insufferable, but we knew we were right. I still
remember vividly the night when Radek Sikorski — now Poland’s Foreign
Minister, then a refugee from martial law in Poland — proposed a toast to “the
victims of Yalta”. (So unfamiliar was the allusion that the Canning Club
secretary entered it in the minutes as “the victims of the altar”, whatever that
meant.)
 The Tory dons tried to discourage us from following in their footsteps.
Warning against the inhospitable ideological climate of academe, they directed
us to the press, where we served our apprenticeships as leader writers on the
Daily Telegraph, or as stringers in Mitteleuropa. It was under Norman Stone’s
influence that I went to Germany in the mid-Eighties, notionally to write a
doctorate, but primarily to dabble in journalism. Those pieces I bashed out about
Short Range Nuclear Forces, or life (the lack of it) in East Berlin are now as
much period pieces as the novels of John Le Carré. At the time, however,
travelling to the Eastern Bloc was a revelation: that first train journey from
Hamburg to Berlin in the mid-1980s still haunts me — especially the eerie stops
at dreary stations like Magdeburg where one was forbidden to alight. The smell
of lignite. The all but deserted roads. Housing estates almost as bad as
Glasgow’s, but with a creepy lack of vandalism. And always, alongside the
trivial differences like the nasty grey plastic shoes, there were the real,
substantive differences. The Party-controlled newspapers, with their unreadably
dull reports of Erich Honecker’s latest visit to Karl-Marx-Stadt to present plastic
decorations to Young Pioneers who had over-fulfilled their quotas. The lousy
food. The crumbling housing once you walked a couple of miles east of
Alexanderplatz. And, perhaps worst of all, the awful reluctance of people to talk
to you in public. To know Eastern Europe was to loathe Communism and to
cheer Margaret Thatcher every time he denounced it.
We were no more than foot-soldiers in the Thatcher Revolution, of course.
The generals were the newspaper proprietors — Rupert Murdoch and Conrad
Black — and the editors — in particular David English of the Daily Mail, but
also Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Charles Moore of the Spectator.
Without the press, orchestrated gruffly by her press secretary Bernard Ingham,
the history of Thatcherism might have been a good deal shorter. Still,
newspapers need copy, and we foot-soldiers churned it out in countless “Why,
Oh Why” opinion pieces, dreamt up over boozy lunches in El Vino’s.
 3
HOW IT WORKED

Thatcherism, as it was plotted at the think tanks, was a kind of medication. The
patient was the British economy. It is fashionable nowadays to argue that there
was no Thatcher miracle in the 1980s. Productivity, it is said, grew more slowly
in the 1980s than in the 1960s and 1970s. The real point, however, is that the gap
between the UK and its European and North American peers had been enormous
in the post-war decades. It was in the 1980s that the gap disappeared. Indeed, the
growth of gross domestic product per hour matched that of Germany and
exceeded that of the Netherlands, Italy and the United States.
Another easy point for critics to score is that unemployment went up under
the Conservatives. When the Tories unveiled their famous “Labour Isn’t
Working” poster in late 1978 — showing a long queue of unemployment benefit
claimants — the unemployment rate in Britain was just above 4 per cent. At its
peak in late 1986 it reached 10.9 per cent. Yet this is to miss the essential point
about Thatcherite economics. It represented a painful but necessary change of
policy regime aimed as much at the problem of chronic inflation and industrial
unrest as at unemployment.
It was not only schoolboys in Glasgow who noticed that prices were rising
and the lights kept going out. The lamentations recorded in A.J.P. Taylor’s diary
exemplify the way the stagflation of the 1970s affected middle class households.
Like most of his generation, Taylor was a man of the Left, though he was also
proud of his ability to earn money from his prolific writing and broadcasting. He
worked hard, lived modestly (spending much of his life in Magdalen College
housing) and managed his own finances meticulously. Divorce was his sole
extravagance. But this Victorian thriftiness was the worst possible strategy for
surviving the Seventies. Taylor’s income from books, broadcasting and
journalism collapsed in real terms after 1969. His wealth was also severely
depleted because, as he told his mistress and future third wife, the Hungarian
historian Éva Haraszti, “all [his] resources were in stocks and shares” in
November 1973 — the eve of one of greatest stock market crashes in British
history, which saw the Financial Times All Share index decline by more than
half.
“The economic situation here is terrible,” he told Haraszti in May 1974.
“Prices go up every day, and soon the pound will be almost worthless. It is all
right for workers and such-like who can push up their wages, but it is ruin for
those with fixed incomes. I can’t see at all what is going to happen to me, and I
am too old to discover new ways of earning a living. The only consolation is that
there are many thousands in the same position.” Two months later, he was even
more despondent:

You can’t realize how near we are to catastrophe. Many serious judges think
that all our banks may close their doors in a few months’ time. Prices have
doubled within the year and are going up faster than ever. My income does
not go up. Indeed, it gradually goes down as I write less. … My pension and
my insurance policies which will start in two years’ time are calculated
according to the pounds I paid in the past, and these are now worth only a
few shillings. You must remember a time in Hungary when all pensioners,
including even professors, were starving or very near it, and we may come to
that soon.

Taylor was right to speculate that he was not alone. The inflation-adjusted
returns on both stocks and bonds were negative in the 1970s. Not just for ageing
professors but also for a large proportion of the British middle class, accustomed
to deriving a significant portion of their income from investments, the Seventies
was the worst decade of the twentieth century aside from 1910 to 1919.
Thatcherism was not just about raising productivity or reducing unemployment.
Far more important was the goal of defeating inflation and restoring prosperity
to the middle class. This it emphatically achieved. Average annual returns on UK
equities and bonds in the 1970s were, respectively, -1.4 per cent and -4.4 per
cent. In the 1980s the figures were 15.4 per cent and 7.5 per cent. For the British
stock market, the Eighties were comfortably the best decade of the twentieth
century. Naïve economists look at the wrong indicators when trying to assess the
Thatcher achievement. They fail to see what the project to restore British
capitalism should be measured by capitalist, not socialist standards. They also
fail to see that to break the inflationary spiral that had eroded British
competitiveness in the 1970s required a measure of what would come to be
known as “shock therapy”.
The shock was administered in the first Thatcher term and was breath-taking
in its ambition — and riskiness. The government almost immediately scrapped
price controls and then removed exchange controls. It intensified the monetarist
policies that the Labour Party had belatedly imposed on the Bank of England,
raising interest rates from 12 per cent to 14 per cent to 17 per cent. And it sought
to reduce the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR) by cutting spending
and raising value added tax. The short-run impact was to cause a sharp
recession, not least because the sharp appreciation of sterling that ensued. But
the effect of this recession, combined with the showdown with the unions in the
second Thatcher term, was to break the inflationary spiral. That, indeed, was the
whole idea behind the Medium Term Financial Strategy introduced in 1980.
Any previous Conservative leader — Churchill included — would surely
have folded in the face of soaring unemployment, plunging popularity and urban
riots. That, indeed, was what the party chairman and two senior ministers urged
Mrs Thatcher to do. Famously, no fewer than 364 economists wrote an open
letter to denounce the 1981 budget, which effectively raised taxes (by not
indexing income tax reliefs) in the teeth of the recession. Margaret Thatcher was
unflinching. There would be no U-turn. There was no alternative. Her loyal
Employment Secretary denounced the rioters who had set Brixton ablaze in
April 1981. “I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father,” Tebbit said.
“He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking
until he found it.” A new Thatcherite slogan was born: “Get on your bike.”
Tebbit and other loyalists were rewarded in the reshuffle of 1981, which saw a
purge of “Wets” like Ian Gilmour and Christopher Soames.
The second phase of Margaret Thatcher’s economic revolution came in her
second term when she confronted the country’s over-mighty trade unions,
forcing union leaders to ballot their members before calling a strike and
abolishing the closed shop. The decisive battle was against the National Union
of Mineworkers and the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Those
who continue to wax lyrical about the supposedly picturesque communities
destroyed by the Tories are seldom those who actually had to live in those grim
colliery towns. In any case, unprofitable mines that were costing taxpayers
around £1 billion a year could hardly be kept open for the sake of their brass
bands and rugby teams. Only in the most fantastic counterfactual could the
British mining industry have been saved on the basis envisaged by the miners’
leader Arthur Scargill. The vast improvement in British industrial relations since
1984 speaks for itself.
The corollary of breaking the power of organized labour was to strengthen
the forces of capitalism. No policy did more to achieve that than the policy of
privatization. Though there had been steps to sell government stakes in
nationalized industries before 1979, it was with the sale of shares in the small
medical diagnostics firm Amersham International in 1982 that the process of
rolling back the state began in earnest. An investor who bought £1,000 of the
shares when Amersham was floated, and who accepted shares in General
Electric when the U.S. company bought it in 2004, would have enjoyed a return
of 2,600 per cent. (In the same period the FTSE-100 index returned 600 per
cent.) The much larger privatization of British Gas in 1986 was not quite such a
bonanza, but it was still a good investment. An investor who bought £1,000 of
shares then, took cash dividends, did not take up rights issues, and held the
shares or their successors until the day of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral would
have made a capital return of around 1,200 per cent. Investments in British
Telecom and British Airways have been rather less lucrative, but by no means
bad.
The point about privatization, however, was not just to make money for
investors. It was to increase the efficiency of the privatized utilities. How far it
succeeded in this continues to be debated. Yet it is hard to believe these firms
would have performed better as state monopolies run by government appointees.
Of equal importance was the objective of widening share ownership by
encouraging first-time investors to participate. Here the results were more
mixed, as many smaller buyers lost no time in selling their shares to realize
initial capital gains. Ownership of financial assets did increase in the 1980s, but
mainly indirectly, as a result of payments into private pension and insurance
schemes.
The Thatcher government actively encouraged such private savings vehicles,
but it would be misleading to say that it encouraged saving. On the contrary, its
most effective fiscal device was designed to encourage borrowing. In 1983 the
government introduced Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS) for the first
£30,000 of a qualifying mortgage. When her Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel
Lawson sought to limit the deduction (so that multiple borrowers could not all
take advantage of it for a single property), he soon “ran up against the brick wall
of Margaret [Thatcher]’s passionate devotion to the preservation of every last
ounce of mortgage interest relief”.
Nor was MIRAS the only way that Thatcher sought to encourage home
ownership. By selling off council houses at bargain-basement prices to a million
and a half aspirant working-class families, she ensured that more and more
British men and women had a home of their own. The result was a leap in the
share of owner-occupiers from 54 per cent in 1981 to 67 per cent ten years later.
The stock of owner-occupied properties soared from just over 11 million in 1980
to more than 17 million twenty-five years later.
Here we come to the very core of the political economy of Thatcherism. The
link between financial deregulation and widening home ownership was the cash
nexus at its heart. It turned bricks and mortar into something more than just a
place to live. Home became an investment; a nest egg. Nothing did more than
rising house prices — they trebled between 1979 and 1990 — to cement the
bond between “Mrs T” and Conservative voters. And no relationship was
statistically more significant than the relationship between mortgage rates and
the government’s popularity. To be precise, every one per cent increase in the
Bank of England’s base lending rate correlated with a three per cent drop in
government popularity. Perhaps not surprisingly, rates had a tendency to be cut
before elections.
 4
THE END OF SOCIETY

Yet to assess the success of Margaret Thatcher purely in terms of economic

performance would be to miss the point. It was not just the economy she set out
to change. It was British society — even the British mentality. Here, too, she was
more successful than most people today appreciate, for the simple reason that the
changes she wrought are now taken for granted, not least by the very people who
once opposed them.
To many of those people, it was easy to categorize Mrs Thatcher as a social
conservative simply because she was not a feminist in the sense of Private Eye’s
“Wimmin” column. Dressed in her twin set, her hair immaculately sculpted, she
looked like a social conservative, after all. Coached out of her Lincolnshire
accent and into Royal Shakespeare Received Pronunciation circa 1950, she also
sounded like one. But she was not. Married to a divorcee, pursuing her political
career even as a new mother, becoming the first and only female prime minister
in British history, Margaret Thatcher was a social revolution in her own right.
Indeed, she was much more of a social revolutionary than even she can have
intended.
The Britain of 1979 was boringly (or, to some, reassuringly) bipolar. Right-
Left, Boy-Girl, Posh-Naff, Protestant-Catholic: you were either on one side or
the other. The working class inhabited the world of situation comedies like
Steptoe and Son, Till Death Do Us Part and On the Buses. By contrast, the
middle class enjoyed The Good Life, which was essentially an argument about
whether to grow one’s own potatoes or twitch net curtains. Under Mrs Thatcher
the hierarchical class system portrayed in the old-fashioned department store
“Grace Brothers” — the setting for Are You Being Served? — was certainly not
overthrown, but it was invaded by the anarchic louts of who featured in The
Young Ones and, perhaps most memorably, by Harry Enfield’s egregious
“Loadsamoney” — the embodiment of the blue collar worker turned self-
employed, self-made, self-ish materialist. (So embarrassed was Enfield by the
popularity of his creation that he felt obliged to give him a Northern alter ego,
“Bugger-All-Money”.)
 For the Essex boys who bought their own houses and started their own
businesses, Thatcherism meant social mobility. Post-war Britain had not been
like that. If your father was working class, so (probably) were you. A very large
proportion of school-leavers in 1982 still assumed that they would follow their
fathers into manufacturing industry, which even after the recession of 1980–81
still accounted for 30 per cent of all employment. Trade union membership
remained high: nearly two out of three male workers were members of a trade
union. People expected to be part of the union until the day they died. Today
there are barely 7 million trade union members in Britain, compared with 12.4
million in 1976.
Not only the shift from industry to services but also the simultaneous
expansion of higher education since 1979 scrambled the class system. In 1977,
there were just over 754,000 full-or part-time students in higher education, and
1.7 million in further education. Today the figures exceed, respectively, 2.4
million and 4.6 million. University degrees are no longer for the elite of school-
leavers. On radio and television, meanwhile, estuary English has become the
norm. Perhaps it was this levelling tendency that the dons of Oxford really could
not forgive, though ostensibly it was her cuts in higher education funding that
led them to deny her the honorary degree that was her due.
Thatcherism also increased mobility in a more basic sense. When Margaret
Thatcher was elected Prime Minister nearly half of British households did not
own a car, and those who did notched up just under 400 billion passenger
kilometres a year. The equivalent figure in 2005 was 678 billion, a 70 per cent
increase. Wanderlust is a German word, but after 1979 it became a British
condition. Before Thatcher, the typical Briton worked in Grimy Town and went
his holidays in Sandy Bay. Only a quarter of British holidays were foreign. In
1981, for example, UK residents made 19 million trips abroad, of which just
over 11 million were by air. Since then, the number of foreign trips Britons take
has increased by a factor of three, and the share of journeys by air has risen from
60 per cent to more than 80 per cent. (The volume of domestic air travel has also
increased by a factor of more than three.)
Back in the late Seventies, only a third of low income households had a
telephone and the pre-privatization system run by the Post Office seemed
designed to keep it that way. Just over half of households had a colour television.
Fun took a fairly limited range of forms. For two-thirds of men, going out meant
going “down the pub”, where almost everyone smoked. (To be precise, in 1976
44 per cent of British men smoked and the average smoker got through 150 fags
a week.) The most popular forms of exercise were the least physically
demanding. According to the 1979 edition of Social Trends, the top sports
among men were billiards and darts. In addition, there were nearly 3.7 million
anglers. When it came to spectator sports, toffs favoured the turf; yobs watched
the footie or went to the dogs. One in seven middle-aged women went to the
Bingo. A third of men in the same age group engaged in betting or did the
football pools.
Thatcherism didn’t destroy all these pastimes, of course, but it greatly
reduced their appeal. Spit and sawdust pubs yielded to tapas bars. One simple
way to track the shifts in our behaviour is to look at changes in the volume of
household expenditure. The biggest increase in expenditure has been on
communication (up by a factor of nearly five since 1981), closely followed by
tourist expenditure abroad (up fourfold) and clothing and footwear (also up
fourfold). Anyone who doubts that Thatcherism raised the quality of life in
Britain has forgotten how badly people dressed and ate in 1979. They also
looked pretty dreadful with their clothes off, as the saucier films of the period
confirm. The yuppies of the Eighties were the first Britons since the days of
National Efficiency to worry about their physical fitness. According to Social
Trends, a much higher proportion of young men play outdoor football than did
back in the early Eighties. A fifth of young men and women regularly visit a
gym or health club, institutions that were virtually unknown in 1979. The
proportion of people who smoke has halved.
Yet there were many aspects of the social changes of the 1980s that Mrs
Thatcher cannot have anticipated, much less welcomed. The nuclear family itself
went nuclear at some point between 1979 and 1990. Back in the late Seventies,
two fifths of all households consisted of married couples with at least one child.
Today that proportion is down to 22 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of single
person households has risen from 22 per cent to 29 per cent. The nuclear family
is now officially out-numbered by social atoms.
Marriage itself matters less. The marriage rate in 2009 touched its lowest
level since records began. The number of children born out of wedlock has
increased by a factor of six since 1976. In 1982 roughly one in every ten babies
born was illegitimate (12 per cent). Today the percentage is closer to 40 per cent,
and in Wales it is more than 50 per cent. Marriages, if couples ever get around to
tying the knot, are also no more likely to last, while divorce appears to habit-
forming. In 1981 just over one in ten men and women divorcing had already
been divorced at least once. Today the proportion is one in five. As families form
and fragment, so households are in a state of unprecedented flux. Lovers,
spouses, offspring and even friends move in. Because of high property prices, a
substantial proportion of children live with their parents into their twenties. But
overall more people move out than move in. In old age we have a much higher
probability than before of ending up alone, often for many years.
Perhaps the most striking change to British society is the result of
immigration. In the early 1980s, it was assumed by official statisticians that net
migration would remain negative as it had been in the 1960s and 1970s, when
people were still fleeing doleful Britain for Canada or Australia. Government
projections were for an annual net outflow of 30,000 a year into the 1990s. In
fact, there was an average annual net inflow, rising from 5,000 in the 1980s to
68,000 in the 1990s. Of course, a far more dramatic upsurge in immigration was
to follow after Labour returned to power in 1997. Nevertheless, the tide of
migration turned on Thatcher’s watch, despite the fact that her government made
it harder for would-be immigrants to marry their way in or to secure work
permits and ended the claim to UK citizenship of former colonial subjects. At
the same time, the sense of Britishness that had once bound together the English,
the Welsh, the Scots and at least some of the Irish grew much weaker in the
Thatcher tears. The Scots in particular repudiated Thatcherism, electing no
Conservative MPs whatsoever by 1997.
These ethnic shifts coincided with another major social change. Perhaps the
biggest change of the past thirty years has been the headlong collapse of
mainstream Christianity in Britain. On an average Sunday in 1979, just under 4
million Britons attended one form of Christian worship or another, of whom
roughly 1.4 million were children aged under 15. Since then church attendance
has plummeted, more than halving among younger age groups. Just under two-
fifths of British residents now say they belong to “no religion” whatever. The
Church of England had other reasons for criticizing the Methodist’s daughter in
its 1985 “Faith in the City” report. But the bishops were right to sense that
Thatcherism was no friend of the established church.
In an interview she gave to — of all publications — Woman’s Own in 1987,
Thatcher set out her own social philosophy in considerable detail. The most
famous line of this interview, invariably taken out context, is “There is no such
thing as society”. But as the full transcript makes clear, Thatcher was anything
but an extreme individualist. She began her reflections by making a
characteristically vivid attack on the dependency culture encouraged by the post-
war welfare state:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people
have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job
to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with
it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are
 casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
There are individual men and women and there are families and no
government can do anything except through people and people look to
themselves first.

But she then continued:

It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our
neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the
entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no
such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation...
[B]enefits... were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job,
you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say:
“But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say:
“Look, It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if
you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you
will feel very much better!”

The interview transcript makes it clear that Thatcher was trying to make the case
against welfare dependency and for an integrated civil society, bound together by
ties of reciprocity — of mutual obligation. In her view, reliance on the state had
gone “too far”:

If children have a problem, [people say] it is society that is at fault. There is

no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and
people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will
depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for
ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts
those who are unfortunate.

Yet it is very clear that this “living tapestry” is in a much weaker state today than
it was in 1979. Associational life has declined markedly in nearly every
dimension: the share of the population claiming to be members of one or more
voluntary associations fell from 52 per cent in 1981 to 43 per cent in 1991. The
percentage of households giving to charity has fallen since 1978 and more than a
third of donations now come from the over-sixty- fives, compared with less than
a quarter some thirty years ago. Here, as in other respects, Margaret Thatcher’s
social revolution was a triumph for the law of unintended consequences.
 5
THE REALIST

The event that, more than any other, defined Margaret Thatcher’s premiership
was the Falklands War. It established her irrevocably in the public mind as the
new Britannia, a warrior queen who gloried in military victory. And, of course, it
ensured a sweeping Conservative victory in the June 1983 election (albeit one
that would have been much less sweeping if the opposition vote had not been so
evenly split between Labour and the SPD).
There is no question that sending the Royal Navy Task Force to the South
Atlantic took great political courage. Not only was Thatcher pressed by many
pusillanimous Conservatives, haunted by memories of the Suez Crisis, to seek a
negotiated settlement — one that would have been tantamount to surrender. The
American Secretary of State Alexander Haig took a similar line.
Yet headlines like “The Empire Strikes Back” misread what had happened.
Margaret Thatcher was not some kind of nostalgic neo-colonialist. Her attitude
to the Falklands was simply that an invasion of the sort launched by the
Argentine junta should be repulsed. It was the same attitude that she took in
August 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. On other “imperial” issues
she revealed a flexibility that often dismayed her more dogmatic supporters. No
political leader had more reason to detest the Irish Republican Army than
Margaret Thatcher. The IRA very nearly killed her when the bombed her hotel in
Brighton on the eve of the 1984 Conservative Party conference. She had been
unyielding in the face of the hunger strikers’ demand to be given the privileges
of political prisoners. And yet in November 1985 she signed the Hillsborough
Anglo-Irish Agreement, which for the first time involved the government of the
Republic of Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. It was Margaret Thatcher,
too, who signed the Anglo-Chinese Joint Agreement that paved the way to the
handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China. To her devotees at
the Spectator, these were lamentable betrayals.
The Left, meanwhile, heaped opprobrium on her for opposing sanctions
against South Africa’s apartheid regime, overlooking that on this issue, too,
Margaret Thatcher was a realist. Her diplomatic engagement with the South
African leadership may have contributed just as much as the sanctions to the
ending of apartheid. At her meetings with P.W. Botha and his successor F.W. de
Klerk, she urged them to free Nelson Mandela. When she finally met with
Mandela himself, she urged him in turn not to go down the road of
nationalization of the economy.
Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with the United States was also
characterized much more by realism than by the romance imagined by the
caricaturists. Although the personal relationship between Thatcher and the
American President Ronald Reagan was undoubtedly warm, on specific issues
each leader put national interest above sentiment. The United States weighed up
carefully whether or not to support Britain against Argentina. Thatcher in turn
felt “dismayed and let down” by Reagan’s decision to overthrow the Marxist
regime in Grenada in 1983. On the other hand, she allowed the Americans to use
airbases in Britain to launch retaliatory strikes against Libya in 1986 following
terrorist attacks against U.S. personnel in Europe.
Not without reason had a Soviet magazine nicknamed Thatcher “the Iron
Lady” in the late 1970s. She was unhesitating when it came to countering the
Soviet deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles in Eastern Europe,
welcoming the arrival of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles at RAF Greenham
Common and RAF Molesworth. Yet as early as December 1984 she had
recognized Mikhail Gorbachev as someone she could “do business” with.
On the question of Europe, too, Thatcher was a good deal more pragmatic in
office than she later became after 1990. It was typical of her combative style to
insist on “having our own money back” at the Dublin European Council in
November 1979. But the agreement five years later to give the UK an annual
rebate of two-thirds of its net contribution to the European Economic
Community was followed just two years later by the Single European Act, a
British-led initiative to improve the integration of what was then still called the
Common Market. It was not until her Bruges speech of 1988 that she staked out
a position of implacable hostility to further European integration with the
memorable declaration: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of
the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a
European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” The irony was
that by this time key members of her own Cabinet were attempting to steer her in
precisely this direction.
 6
FIRST AGAINST EQUALS

An enduring image of Margaret Thatcher is as a dictatorial prime minister. It was

perhaps inevitable that one of the first female leaders in the Western world
would be caricatured in this way — dressed as a man, if not as Hitler himself, in
her Spitting Image caricature, towering over the trembling homunculi of her
Cabinet. But was there any truth to this?
Criticism of “her style of government” was first aired by the mercurial
Michael Heseltine at the time of the battle over the Westland helicopter
company, and again when he vainly challenged her for the party leadership; it
was later repeated by Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. In Heseltine’s words,
“Decisions continue to be taken and imposed that do not carry the collective
endorsement.” Ian Gilmour, one of the first “Wets” to go, took a similar view in
his memoir: “Mrs Thatcher regarded her … Cabinets not as an aid to good
government, but as an obstacle to be surmounted. Her belief was that dialogue
was a waste of time.” In the words of Kenneth Baker: “Sometimes Margaret
would start a meeting by summing up. … [She] categorized the ministers into
those she could put down, those she could break down and those she could wear
down.”
Not all her ministers agreed, however. According to Norman Fowler,
Thatcher “basically allowed me to develop my own plans without interference.”
David Young recalled “Prime Minister act[ing] as a good chairman”; while
Nicholas Ridley was adamant that it was “Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson
who refused to operate the normal conventions of Cabinet government”. Both he
and Alan Clark made the point that “she never really had enough true
supporters” in the Cabinet. In the words of the inimitable Clark, whose diary
remains the most entertaining primary source of the era: “All the wets and Blue
Chips and general Heathite wankers seem ineradicable.”
The evidence that Thatcher was capable of overruling her ministers is
certainly there. According to her own memoir, for example, it was she — with
the advice of her economic adviser Alan Walters — who pressed for interest rate
cuts and a lower PSBR (i.e., higher taxes) in 1981, against the wishes of
Geoffrey Howe. Though it nearly blew up in her face, the Westland affair also
shows that she was capable of ruthlessness when faced with dissent in the
Cabinet. In The Downing Street Years, Thatcher claimed that she and Leon
Brittan had “bent over backwards to give Michael every opportunity to advance
the European arguments and interests”; and that she “was not consulted” about
the leaking of the Attorney General Patrick Mayhew’s letter to Heseltine. But
very different accounts are offered by no fewer than three ex-ministers. Norman
Fowler says of the final meeting at which Heseltine resigned: “I had written on
my notepad ‘Heseltine silenced’ and there is no doubt that that is how it would
have been seen. He was right to fear the consequences.” According to Fowler,
Thatcher had denied Heseltine “a full and early Cabinet discussion … so that he
could have put his case”. Kenneth Baker goes further still: “The formidable
power of No 10 was being wielded with all its over-arching and personal
authority to ensure that on this occasion the Prime Minister’s will prevailed. It
was not so much the future of the Westland company which was at stake, it was
the nature of Prime Ministerial government.” As for Lawson, he makes it clear
that she knew about the leaking of the Mayhew-Heseltine letter.
In short, the years 1979–1986 did indeed see Thatcher overruling key
Cabinet ministers on a few important occasions. But in this regard the contrast
with the later years of her premiership is striking.
Of course there are those who continue to maintain that she was the
“architect of the poll tax” or community charge; and her unrepentant views in
her own memoirs only reinforce this impression. But in truth, as most of the
other detailed accounts clearly show, it was others who devised the tax and made
the running in implementing it: George Younger (who wanted it for Scotland),
Kenneth Baker and William Waldegrave (who devised it), as well as Nicholas
Ridley (who, fatally, dropped the idea of a transitional “dual running” of the tax
alongside the rates). Outright opposition was evidently confined to Nigel
Lawson, with words of warning at an early stage from Whitelaw, Young and a
few others. Thatcher herself was, as Lawson observes, “ambivalent” — which
accords with the contradictory argument in her own memoirs, that the tax would
have increased local accountability if only there had been more central control
on council spending. In allowing the poll tax to proceed, Lawson notes
significantly, “She observed the proprieties of Cabinet government throughout.”
If the poll tax was the product of proper Cabinet government, the shift of
monetary policy from targeting domestic indicators to shadowing the
deutschmark and finally joining the ERM most certainly was not. But nor was it
a product of prime ministerial diktat; on the contrary, it came about as a result of
prime ministerial weakness.
 To be sure, as early as 1982 she herself had agreed to join the European
Exchange Rate Mechanism “when the time was right”. But her own account
makes it clear that she was the one being pushed around. “Though I did not
know it at the time,” she recalled of the spring of 1987, “Nigel Lawson began to
follow a new policy [shadowing the deutschmark], different from mine, different
from that which the Cabinet had agreed … He … pursued a personal economic
strategy without reference to the rest of the government.” At the Madrid summit
in June 1989 Lawson and Howe threatened to resign if she did not agree to set a
date for sterling’s entry into the ERM. She responded by demoting Howe from
the post of Foreign Secretary and listening even more intently to Alan Walters.
Lawson resigned that October, but his successor John Major proved just as
fixated on the ERM. On the eve of the Conservative conference that same
month, he did a deal with her: a pre-conference cut in interest rates in return for
joining the ERM. In her own words: “I had too few allies to resist.” Her final
gamble was that Major would not “swallow … the slogans of the European
lobby”. It failed.
Thatcher’s account of these events might be dismissed as special pleading
were it not for the fact that it accords in almost every essential with the other
published accounts. Ridley agrees, suggesting, revealingly, that she was “being a
little too tolerant” in not sacking Lawson. Baker agrees; she should have sacked
him, but felt too weak to do so. Most remarkably, the version given by Lawson
himself is little different. In the light of all this evidence, it is difficult to take
seriously his charge that it was Thatcher who “never once sought Cabinet’s
endorsement of a fundamental change of policy. … She simply acted as if
government policy were different from what she herself repeatedly avowed it to
be.” If only she had. In place of the dictatorial premier who drove one saintly
minister after another too far, we begin to discern the true Thatcher; an isolated
figure in a Cabinet of Europhiles.
In short, the memoir sources of the Thatcher era give the lie to the myth that
Thatcher was an autocratic prime minister. She certainly began that way; but
already by the mid-1980s she was losing her ability to impose her will on her
Cabinet. The poll tax — supposedly her first fatal mistake — was a classic
product of Cabinet government, a tax all too recognizably designed by a
committee. The exchange rate policy that led first to inflation then recession was
imposed on her by the Lawson-Howe duumvirate and its Major-Hurd successor.
Her final downfall was the culmination of this conflict between her and her
ministers. On October 30 Thatcher denounced the Delors plan for a federal
Europe with a defiant “No! No! No!” — one “no” apiece for the European
parliament, executive and senate that Delors envisaged. Two days later Howe
quit. Just weeks later, deserted by her Cabinet colleagues, she too was forced to
resign.
“I knew that I could save this country and that no one else could,” Thatcher
wrote in her memoirs. “There was a revolution to be made but too few
revolutionaries. … I believed that (my Cabinet colleagues) had … become
convinced of my basic principles … I now know that such arguments are never
finally won.” These words sum up the events that led to her resignation. In the
end, if key Cabinet ministers were determined enough, then the lady was for
turning.
 7
RIGHT

It is still terribly hard for those who opposed her to admit it, but Margaret
Thatcher was right about most things. She was right that the British trade unions
had become much too powerful. She was right that nationalized industries had to
be privatized. She was right that inflation has monetary causes.
She was also mostly right about foreign policy. She was right to drive the
forces of the Argentine junta out of the Falklands and she was right to exhort a
“wobbly” George H.W. Bush to mete out the same treatment to Saddam
Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. She was right to see the opportunity offered by
Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.
The outcome of the Cold War seems inevitable with the benefit of hindsight.
But for most of the 1980s, Thatcher had to endure a relentless stream of criticism
from fellow travellers and useful idiots: believers in unilateral disarmament who
would gladly have allowed to the Soviets to establish dominance in intermediate
range nuclear forces in Europe, as well as exponents of “convergence theory”,
who insisted that the countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact were gradually
and peacefully growing alike (give or take the odd gulag).
Above all, however, Margaret Thatcher was right about Europe. She was
right to push Europe in the direction of real free trade by backing and signing the
Single European Act of 1986. Yet she was equally right to oppose the idea of a
single European currency.
On this issue, she found herself up against not the Left — many old
Labourites were just as wary of Europe — but the wisdom of the British elites.
The Financial Times and the Economist had been broadly supportive of
Thatcher’s domestic economic reforms. But on Europe they, along with the
majority of the great and the good in the City, consistently criticized her. The
City view was that Thatcher and her adviser Alan Walters were economic
backwoodsmen, who failed to grasp the immense benefits that would be
conferred on Britain by a fixed exchange rate and ultimately membership of a
single European currency. I well remember how hard it was to take her side in
those arguments. I was mercilessly patronized by, among others, the chairman of
a venerable merchant bank and by the City editor of the Telegraph.
Yet subsequent events have largely vindicated Margaret Thatcher’s view.
Sterling’s entry into the ERM was an unmitigated economic policy disaster.
Tying Britain’s fortunes to the decisions of the Bundesbank in Frankfurt, ERM
membership led to an unnecessarily severe recession in 1990–1992, which ended
only when — with some help from George Soros — the pound was forced out of
the ERM.
There were those who argued that the ERM fiasco illustrated the even
greater advantages of a full monetary union over a system of fixed exchange
rates. But once again subsequent events have confirmed the Thatcherite view
that an independent monetary policy is an essential part of a nation’s sovereignty.
Just ask yourself how Britain would have fared if, like Portugal, Ireland, Italy,
Greece and Spain, we had been inside the Eurozone when the financial crisis
struck. One shudders to think of it.
It has long been conventional wisdom that Margaret Thatcher was wrong
about one thing above all. She was wrong, so the argument goes, to oppose
German reunification. Indeed, most recent accounts of the events of 1989–1990
portray her as a kind of female Basil Fawlty, stuck in a Second World War time
warp. Yet future historians may look back on negative reaction to German
reunification with more sympathy than most commentators felt at the time. In an
internal memorandum, written on February 2, 1990, Thatcher offered a shrewd
commentary on the West German government’s position that reunification would
pose no strategic threat if it were accompanied by increased European
integration. “The problems will not be overcome by strengthening the EC,” she
wrote. “Germany’s ambitions would then become the dominant and active
factor.”
Later that same year, she tried vainly to persuade John Major to help her talk
the continental Europeans out of the project of monetary union:

We had arguments which might persuade both the Germans — who would
be worried about the weakening of anti-inflation policies — and the poorer
countries — who must be told that they would not be bailed out of the
consequences of a single currency, which would therefore decimate their
inefficient economies.

There are rather a large number of people in Southern Europe today — and
perhaps also in Paris — who would acknowledge that here, too, Thatcher was
right. Only last year, the Italian Prime Minister complained of being treated as if
Italy was in a “semi-colonial” relationship to Germany. Quod erat
demonstrandum.
 8
GREAT

Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 was one of a number of events that year
that decisively changed the course of history. It was the same year that Deng
Xiaoping toured the United States. It was the same year that the Ayatollah
Khomeini came to power in Iran. It was the same year that the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan. Probably China’s economic revolution and Iran’s religious
revolution have influenced more people than Margaret Thatcher’s political
revolution. Nevertheless, we should never understate the magnitude of her
achievement.
Like many great leaders, including her Labour reincarnation Tony Blair,
Margaret Thatcher has come to be more respected abroad than she ever was at
home. Left-leaning Britons who opposed her during the 1980s find it especially
hard to admit that she was mostly right and they were nearly always wrong.
Those of us who took her side are entitled to feel proud that we were on history’s
winning side. But we should have no illusions about the humble supporting roles
we played. She was the leader, proof that sometimes it really is a single
individual who can change the course of history.
“I can’t bear Britain in decline,” Margaret Thatcher told a BBC interviewer
in April 1979. “I just can’t.” Nor could we. For much of the 1970s that decline
had looked irreversible. Yet Margaret Thatcher, armed with the ideas of the think
tanks, egged on by the media dons and hacks, stopped the rot. She cured the
economy of the diseases of inflation and unrest. She created a property-owning
democracy. She unleashed a partly unintended social revolution. And, with her
shrewdly realist foreign policy, she restored Britain’s standing in the world. In all
of this, she truly was the saviour of her country. All too many people today
underestimate her achievement, just as some of her own ministers did at the
time. But this old punk, for one, will be forever grateful.