Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain

When Margaret Hilda Thatcher took over as Prime Minister, in May, 1979, I was sixteen. To Britons of my generation, she wasn’t merely a famous Conservative politician, a champion of the free market, and a vocal supporter of Ronald Reagan: she was part of our mental furniture, and always will be. The day after her electoral triumph, Mr. Hill, my fifth form English teacher, an avuncular fellow with longish hair and a mustache, who had never previously expressed any political opinions, came into the classroom and shouted, “Right, you lot. Shut up and get down to work. It’s a new regime.” My father, a lifelong Labour Party voter, was equally aghast, especially when he discovered that my mother had voted for Mrs. T., on the grounds that “it’s about time we had a woman in charge.”

The Iron Lady, a sobriquet that some Soviet journalists would subsequently bestow upon her, was already inside 10 Downing Street, laying down the law. On her way in, famously, she stopped and quoted St. Francis of Assisi about bringing harmony where there was doubt—a statement that I and many others came to see as the first of her many outrages. How could such a divisive, bellicose, and heartless figure have the gall to talk like that? But this morning, watching for the first time in many years some footage of what she said, I realized that she wasn’t actually trying to portray herself as a conciliator. Mrs. Thatcher—and despite the life peerage that gave her the title of baroness, no one in Britain would call her anything else—was sending a sterner message about what lay ahead. Flanked by two burly policemen, her blonde hair swept back and lacquered into immobility, she also recited several more of St. Francis’s lines: “Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” Then, quoting the late Airey Neave, her aristocratic mentor in the Conservative Party, whom the I.N.L.A, an offshoot of the I.R.A., had blown up just weeks earlier, she added in a voice that, even today, thirty-four years later, can set my teeth grating: “There is now work to be done.”

Indeed there was. Even her harshest critics would concede as much. By the late nineteen-seventies, the social compact that had held Britain together since the Second World War appeared to be coming apart at the seams. During the previous decade, under governments of both major parties, there had been a seemingly endless series of labor strikes, which had brought the country to a standstill. To a schoolboy like me, they were sometimes fun. When the bus drivers went on strike, you didn’t have to go to school. When the lights went out, because of a stoppage by power workers, you couldn’t do your homework. But in the winter of 1978-79, when the local government unions walked out, leaving the garbage piling up in the streets and the dead laying, unburied, in the morgues, many Brits decided that enough was enough. Prominent among them was the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, a nondescript market town in Lincolnshire.

In subsequent years, her name would come to be associated with laissez-faire economists like Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. But Mrs. Thatcher’s guiding philosophy was really more homespun. It emanated from the shop she lived above with her mother and father, Alderman Albert Roberts, who believed in hard work, thrift, and balancing the books. “Some say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour,” Mrs. Thatcher said, in a 1982 speech to a banquet of grandees in the City of London. “But I do not repent. Those parables would have saved many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis.”

Beset by a big budget deficit and a falling pound, the previous Labour government had been forced to go cap-in-hand to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan. Mrs. Thatcher, an English patriot of the school of Elgar and Churchill, considered that a national humiliation. As part of a commitment to bring down inflation and balance the budget, her government cut spending sharply, and when the inevitable recession ensued, Mrs. Thatcher resisted calls for a change in strategy, telling the Conservative party conference in 1981, “The lady’s not for turning.

By that stage, I was at university (where, funnily enough, my fellow blogger and transplant Andrew Sullivan was one of Mrs. T.’s most vocal supporters). My tutor in macroeconomics, David Soskice, a brilliant man whose father had served as a Labour Home Secretary during the nineteen-sixties, thought the government’s economic strategy made no sense. (His colleague, the eminent economic historian Nicholas Crafts, while equally dismissive of some of the things Mrs. Thatcher was doing, was also of the view that a strike-prone and inefficient industrial sector needed shock therapy.) I heartily agreed with Soskice. Every few months, I’d go down to London to protest. Walking around Hyde Park and bellowing “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie—Out! Out! Out!” was good for the spirit, but it didn’t make the blindest bit of difference, especially after General Galtieri made the terrible blunder of sending some Argentine troops to occupy the Falkland Islands, which were known in Argentina as Las Malvinas.

Seemingly the only two people who doubted that Mrs. Thatcher would send a military force to retake the tiny islands in the South Atlantic, whose two-thousand-odd residents were mostly of British descent, were the Argentine dictator and the U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. In April, 1982, Haig flew to London to try and broach a diplomatic solution, only to be dispatched back to Washington with a hornet rather than a flea in his ear. “High color is in her cheeks, a note of rising indignation in her voice, she leans across the polished table and flatly rejects what she calls the ‘woolliness’ of our secondstage formulation,” the U.S. diplomat Jim Rentschler noted in his diary after the fateful meeting between Haig and Thatcher.

Like most of Mrs. Thatcher’s critics (and, presumably, like Haig), I viewed the subsequent war, which saw more than nine hundred people killed—more than two-thirds of them were Argentines—as a pointless exercise in post-colonial posturing. Mrs. Thatcher, egged on by the Murdoch/Rothermere/Harmsworth tabloids, revelled in playing the role of Lord Palmerston and teaching Johnny Foreigner a lesson. “[W]hat was the alternative?” she wrote in her memoirs. “That a common or garden dictator should rule over the queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was prime minister.”

If the British expeditionary force had been defeated, she would have been finished. But the Argentine conscripts were no match for the professional British soldiers, and Mrs. Thatcher was triumphant. Emerging from 10 Downing Street on a dark April evening, she stood beside John Nott, her Defense Minister, as he announced the Argentine surrender on South Georgia, a neighboring island to the Falklands, following a British naval bombardment. Refusing to take any questions from the assembled hacks, she instead instructed them: “Just rejoice at that news, and congratulate our forces and the marines. Good night, gentlemen.”

To me and to many others at the time, that sounded like rejoicing at the opening engagement of a war that, within weeks, would claim the lives of nearly a thousand people. But watching the footage again this morning, I have to admit, I couldn’t help cracking a smile at her temerity, her hectoring, and her sheer certitude that she was in the right. She really was something else. No wonder women like my mother (who never voted for her after 1979) admired her strength of character. You think Hillary Clinton is tough?

To be sure, she was fortunate in her opponents. During the 1983 general-election campaign, I went to see Michael Foot, the bookish leftist who headed the Labour Party, give a speech at Oxford Town Hall. As he walked from the stage, raising his cane in the air, the crowd of students, academics, and Labor activists gave him a tremendous reception. But out in the public projects east of the city, where I canvassed for the local Labour candidate, Foot and his party were much less popular. When the votes were counted on election day, Mrs. Thatcher had scored the most decisive win since Labour’s historic victory in 1945.

The following year, she crushed Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers, and her domestic triumph was complete. Studying down south, I didn’t witness any of the violent clashes that took place during the miners’ strike, but my father, who worked on building sites throughout Yorkshire, did. One day, he saw the police, decked out in full riot gear, chasing a group of miners down a slip road to the M1—a packed six-lane highway. With the miners ducking in and out of traffic, and the cops pursuing them with truncheons raised, it was about the most disturbing thing he’d seen, my father said.

In 1984, I left England for a scholarship in America. Thereafter many of my observations of Mrs. Thatcher were from afar, but I didn’t quite lose touch. Back in Britain for a year in 1986-87, I worked on the business section of the Sunday Times, a Murdoch-owned paper that strongly supported the Conservative Party. With the issuing of publicly-traded shares by British Telecom, which had previously been publicly owned, Mrs. Thatcher’s great privatization experiment had begun—an experiment that would be copied worldwide. By the time I returned to Britain, in 1991, it was a country transformed. The unions had been tamed, the utilities had been privatized, welfare benefits had been cut back, the City of London had been deregulated, the property market had boomed (and busted), and the multi-channel celebrity culture had been unleashed. For good or ill, Britain had become a modern capitalist society.

Mrs. Thatcher had gone, though. And, just by coincidence, I had seen her at her moment of defeat. In November, 1990, I happened to be in Paris covering one of George H. W. Bush’s overseas trips. Mrs. Thatcher, then in her third term as Prime Minister, was in France, too, for some summit or another. That very day, back in London, she had been subjected to the indignity of a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine, an ambitious Tory with whom she had long had frosty relations. After eleven years of her running things, even many Tories had had their fill. (Her latest right-wing wheeze, replacing progressive property taxes with a regressive poll tax, had sparked large-scale riots.) Though she defeated Heseltine in an initial ballot of Conservative M.P.s, her margin of victory wasn’t large enough to avoid a second ballot.

Along with some British journalists, I kept vigil at the British Embassy on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Accompanied by Sir Bernard Ingham, her faithful spokesman, who, like myself, was from Yorkshire, she eventually came out into a courtyard, her face ashen, and made a short statement saying she intended to fight on. But the fatal blow had been inflicted. After she returned to London, several senior colleagues told her they would support somebody else in a second ballot. Facing the humiliating prospect of defeat, she announced her withdrawal from the leadership contest, which John Major went on to win.

Bemused foreigners were left to ask how the great British leader could have lost power without ever having been defeated at the ballot box. Evidently, Mrs. Thatcher often asked herself the same question. Though she maintained a public silence, her allies let it be known that she felt betrayed. In the ensuing months, via a series of leaks, she consistently undermined Major, who was guilty, among other things, of striking a more pro-European stance than she favored. Removed from the stage she craved, she flew around the world giving speeches. One of them, at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, I witnessed. During the Q. & A. session, Bill Schreyer, the chairman of Merrill Lynch, asked her about reports that she had been privately criticizing Major.

According to the report I filed to the Sunday Times, “a nervous hush fell over the ballroom.” Perhaps that was a bit of poetic license, but Mrs. Thatcher didn’t disappoint. After lashing out at the media—“very rarely do they get it right”—she pointed out that big and consequential decisions had to be made about Britain’s future, such as whether to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which was the precursor to the euro. “The more openly we discuss them, the more thoroughly we discuss them, the better,” she said. “So I think a little less silence might be called for on my part.” Several British reporters immediately ran for the phones—no cell phones in those days. In London, first-edition time was approaching, and this was front-page material. “Maggie vows: ‘I won’t be muzzled,’ ” said one of the journalists, rehearsing a potential headline. “Maggie launches new crusade on Europe,” offered another.

Until today, that article was about the last thing I wrote about Mrs. Thatcher, who, shunned by her party and, eventually, stricken by Alzheimers, gradually faded into the background, until Meryl Streep, in the 2011 film “The Iron Lady,” defied a script heavily focussed on the title figure’s encroaching dementia to show some of her vigor and obstreperousness. In Mrs. Thatcher’s death, as is the custom, we will be deluged with tributes and under-cooked analyses. A ceremonial funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral is being prepared. Already, the debate about her legacy is raging, with Bernard Ingham describing her as the greatest Prime Minister of the twentieth century—take that, Winston!—and some of her former foes describing her as an obdurate, uncaring warmonger.

Ed Miliband, the current leader of the Labour Party, offered a more carefully-crafted statement:

She will be remembered as a unique figure. She reshaped the politics of a whole generation. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister. She moved the center ground of British politics and was a huge figure on the world stage. The Labour Party disagreed with much of what she did, and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength.

Like every contemporary British politician, Miliband has to calibrate his message for a social, economic, and political constellation that Mrs. Thatcher did much to fashion. And even now that she’s gone, she can’t be ignored.

Photograph: Camera Press/Redux

Correction: In the original post, I did not make clear that Mrs. Thatcher’s famous “rejoice” comment came after Argentine forces surrendered in South Georgia rather than the Falklands proper. At that stage, there hadn’t been any fatalities, and my suggestion that Mrs. Thatcher appeared to be calling for rejoicing at people’s deaths was unwarranted.