“U-turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.”
By Conrad Black
The news of
the death of Margaret Thatcher is not, at her age and in the condition that she
has been in for some years, a great surprise or entirely sad. But in
contemplation of the great career she had and the immense service she rendered
the United Kingdom and the Western world, it is overwhelmingly sad. In general,
Britain’s greatest prime ministers have served successfully in wars with other
Great Powers: William Pitt the Elder (in the Seven Years’ War), William Pitt
the Younger (in the Napoleonic Wars), Palmerston (in the Crimean War), David
Lloyd George (in the Great War), and Winston Churchill (in World War II).
Robert Walpole, Robert Peel, John Russell, Benjamin Disraeli, William Ewart
Gladstone, and the Marquess of Salisbury are also generally reckoned to be
great prime ministers, either as stylish survivors like Walpole and Salisbury
or as great reformers, and especially if their accomplishments were leavened
with a tremendous wit, parliamentary legend, and literary cachet, as Disraeli’s
and Churchill’s were.
Margaret Thatcher conducted only a secondary war (the Falklands), as
Salisbury did (against the Boers), but she conducted it extremely well
and to the ultimate benefit of the enemy, as Argentinean democracy,
whatever its limitations, resulted from the British rout of the
Ruritanian and brutal junta that lumbered out of the Buenos Aires
Officers’ Club in their over-bemedaled tunics to oust the nightclub
singer who was the widow and successor of Juan Perón in 1976. But as a
reformer, who changed the country for the better, she easily surpassed
any of the others, and she served longer than any had consecutively —
eleven years — since the First Reform Act in 1832 broadened the
electorate and democratized the constituency system. In these 180 years,
only Gladstone, in four separate terms and a parliamentary career
spanning 63 years, and Salisbury, scion of Britain’s most exalted family
(the Cecils) and chosen heir of Disraeli, in three terms, served longer
than Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a provincial grocer.
It has been a disservice to her great achievements that Margaret
Thatcher has been torn down by the Left, ungratefully deserted by her
own party, and had her privacy violated by vulgar snobbery and snide
cinematography (even if somewhat redeemed by the thespian artistry of
Meryl Streep). Not too much should be read into the confused defection
of the Conservative party from the legacy of the only person in 180
years who has led them to three consecutive full-term election
victories. The British Conservatives leave the selection and retention
of leaders to the parliamentary party, and have knifed every leader they
have had since Stanley Baldwin, who took a good look at the Nazis and
retired in 1937, except those who retired before they could be
disembarked. Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden,
Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, and Iain Duncan-Smith
were pushed out, and Alec Douglas-Home, John Major, William Hague, and
Michael Howard retired before that indignity could be inflicted on them.
Sharper by far than a serpent’s tooth is a British Conservative MP’s
ingratitude.
When Margaret Thatcher was narrowly elected prime minister in 1979
over James Callaghan, the United Kingdom was on daily audit from the
International Monetary Fund, currency controls prevented the removal of
more than a few hundred pounds from the country, top corporate and
personal income-tax rates were 80 and 98 percent, and those who had the
temerity and persistence to enjoy a capital gain (which was hard to come
by in Britain in that economic climate) were apt to enjoy the
exaltation of soul generated by an effective tax rate of over 100
percent. The entire economy was in the hands of an intellectually
corrupt, Luddite trade-union confederation, which chose most of the
delegates to any conference of the governing Labour party, and whose
shop stewards and craft-unit heads could shut down an entire industry in
mid-contract for any reason, from an individual work grievance to the
sour grapes generated by a poor round of darts in their local pub (on
working hours).
In the year preceding the 1979 election, in what became known as “the
winter of discontent,” almost every industry in the country had been
shut down by capricious strikes, including the airports, trains,
electric power, coal mines, garbage collection, and undertaking. The
captains of industry and finance in the City, the style-setters in
Mayfair and the West End, the doyennes of Bloomsbury and Knightsbridge,
and the denizens of the chancelleries and ministries of Belgravia and
Westminster huddled in the cold and dark, dead or alive.
Government-owned operations, from the steel industry to the airports,
were a cesspool of inefficiency and, in the private sector, large
numbers of fictitious jobs were salaried and the proceeds went as
sinecures to union favorites or into a pot to be divided at the pleasure
of the union bosses. It fell to Margaret Thatcher to redeem Britain
from the slough of despond and lassitude in which it had been totally
immersed by overindulgence of the workers’ leaders in guilt over the
inequalities of British life. These were brought out in vivid relief
when the whole nation fought together, with egalitarian valor, through
the horrors of the world wars.
The Britain whose headship Margaret Thatcher had assumed had not led a
foreign military operation since the debacle at Suez in 1956, in which
the British and French, by prearrangement and without consulting the
United States, incited an Israeli invasion of the Sinai and then
bunglingly invaded Egypt and masqueraded as peacekeepers separating the
two combatants. Twenty-five years later, the Argentineans invaded the
Falklands and the British forcibly ejected them. Then, as always,
Margaret Thatcher did not flinch. Nor did she when the Irish terrorists
blew up her hotel at Brighton, killing several of her MPs: She insisted
that the conference open exactly on time the next morning and gave
extemporaneously an unforgettable call to arms against the terrorists.
Nor did she when, as she cleaned up the state-owned industries and
disemployed hundreds of thousands of under-worked beneficiaries of
decades-old feather-bedding, and she was reviled in huge demonstrations.
She did not waffle or waver over deployment of intermediate-range
nuclear missiles in Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy to counter the
Soviet ICBMs already in place in the satellite countries. When asked
whether she sought a “nuclear-free Europe,” she instantly replied that
she favoured “a war-free Europe.”
When large chunks of her parliamentary party lost their nerve over
her free-market economics — a reduction of the top personal income-tax
rate to 40 percent, elimination of all currency controls, massive
privatization of industry, and right-to-work laws to remove the terror
of the labor leadership — she famously told her party conference:
“U-turn if you want; the lady’s not for turning.” She was a rock-solid
supporter of the Western Alliance and was instrumental in the balanced
elimination of intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the
satisfactory end of the Cold War. She is generally credited with
assisting President George H. W. Bush in determining that Saddam Hussein
had to be evicted from Kuwait: “George, this is no time to go wobbly.”
She made Britain the fourth economic power in the world, after the U.S.,
Japan, and Germany, made her prosperous and a low-tax country with
declining public debt, improving public services, and steady trade
surpluses. As she promised, she restored “Great” to Great Britain. It
was, to scale, Elizabeth I’s Gloriana, without Shakespeare to publicize
it, and with more than a trace of the Churchillian courage and virtue
that first attracted her to a Conservative candidacy under Churchill’s
leadership in 1950 and 1951.
She formed her judgment of Germany when the Luftwaffe (in what must
rank as one of the greatest long-term strategic blunders of World War
II) bombed the town of Grantham, where teenage Margaret Thatcher lived.
And she formed her opinion of Americans from the U.S. servicemen, black
and white, whom she and her family invited home for dinner after the
wartime Sunday services in her local Methodist church. She was always
grateful for America’s deliverance of the old world from the evils of
Nazism and Communism, always supported the right of Israel to survive
and flourish as a Jewish state, and never went cock-a-hoop for sanctions
against what she called “the evil and repulsive” apartheid regime in
South Africa, because she did not “see how we will make things better by
making them worse.” She was a practical person of unswerving principle.
She was a strong woman, but never a mannish one. She was an Oxford
alumna (in chemistry) when they were somewhat rare, a Tory candidate for
Parliament, an MP, and a female cabinet secretary when they were rare,
the first woman leader of a major party in Britain, and the first woman
prime minister; she assimilated this meritocratic rise, in the gritted
teeth of hidebound British high-Tory traditionalism, with neither
diffidence nor triumphalism. When she became the leader of the party,
she entered the Carlton Club, the Conservatives’ social headquarters in
St. James, and when informed that ladies were not allowed in other than
as guests, she replied as she brushed past the doorman: “They are now.”
She often worried before speeches, feared greatly for British servicemen
she sent into battle, in the Falklands and Iraq, and was never flippant
or blasé about the human and historic consequences of important
decisions she took. She was always strong, sometimes impatient, but
never arrogant. While she was sometimes overbearing with colleagues and
others who could stand up for themselves, she was always considerate of
and exquisitely courteous to subordinates, and was beloved of the staff
at Downing Street and Chequers.
Her successors have squandered most of the national economic strength
and political capital she bequeathed to them. She was undercut and
stabbed more in the back than the front by her own party, for advocating
in respect of Europe precisely what the great majority of the British
public now believes — that European cooperation is unambiguously good,
but integration should be approached with caution by Britain, until it
is not stripping institutions that have served it well for centuries in
favor of well-intentioned but unfledged replacements.
Personally, it was a great honor that she (and Lord Carrington)
sponsored me as a member of Their Lordships’ House, and that she and the
magnificent Sir Denis Thatcher came to Barbara’s and my wedding party,
and often to our home. When I was in London in the autumn, her advisers
said that she was not reliably well enough to receive me, but they
conveyed my best wishes at an appropriate moment and I cherish her warm
and gracious reply. When she retired as prime minister, the party
chairman, Kenneth Baker, a loyal supporter, said, “We shall not see her
like again,” and she said, “It’s a funny old world.” The following day,
when she easily rebutted a no-confidence motion, the hard-left Labour MP
Dennis Skinner loudly said, to great applause, “You can wipe the floor
with this lot, Margaret,” referring to those who would succeed her in
both parties. So she could. She was a saintly woman, and one of the
great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history.
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