Moore, Charles – Margaret Thatcher, The Authorised Biography: Volume One ; Penguin, (London: 2014).
I cannot claim to any unusual competence in commenting on politics and politicians. It is undeniable, that the 2020s has become a period in which politicians are like celebrities, and their rise and fall is almost a sport which the masses watch with commitment and enjoyment, depending on who is winning or losing.
The British parliament, we have begun to suspect, is not in command of the country, whether by design or by default. It has never been so true, I think, that the players in the game of British politics, are to a man all ‘in it for themselves’. This is natural, when they have no actual power, in the face of other factors such as civil service inertia, legal barriers, and the other causes of parliamentary irrelevance, such as they have been isolated and described. And also natural, if they have more interest in the future and in progress, than in the past; because the future is, in general, nothing at all, and specifically does not exist.
Where the post-war consensus had it, that Britain must give up its sovereignty so as to join Europe, it was natural that parliament became flaccid. The importance of ‘the markets’ also ensures, that in order to keep the value of the pound in order, deliberate or grandiose things must never be allowed, and no one politician with an idea ever holds office.
But the single most important idea any British politician should ever have had, in a democracy, should have been a pure undeviating nationalism. Any deviation ought only to have been permitted, when some more devious form of national self-interest suggested itself. Democracy is a way of managing the state; it is the way of a particular group of people demanding of the state, that it look after their interests, and these people are, in Britain, the British. Therefore, pure democracy is also and always, pure nationalism.
Mrs Thatcher’s rise to the position of Prime Minister, and the three or four major problems she faced and set out deliberately to solve, are the subject of Charles Moore’s first volume of her biography. What characterises Thatcher is that she lived in an era when the sovereignty of parliament was still more or less uncontested; even so, she led her party in an era when it was relatively uncommon for a politician to naively espouse and enforce nationalism, which is what she did.
Moore’s is an ‘authorised biography’, authorised by the former Prime Minister and her estate. He had access to the paperwork, the archives, the diaries and minutes, and he exploits them to the full. The style is, to include in the book, anybody of any consequence, and any event which befell Thatcher, during her time in office as an MP, or as Prime Minister. The account of her early years consists to an extraordinary extent, of descriptions of her dresses, her trips to town to buy a dress or style her hair; her courting; her holidays. And when she became an MP, there are descriptions of her speeches, her associations with fellow conservatives, the individuals with whom she interacted, bar none.
I mean to say, this is not philosophy; it is a record of Thatcher’s work schedule. Unconsciously, a plot emerges from this day by day, linear narrative of a woman; maybe five or six major political problems start to form. The Falklands war, obviously; Northern Ireland’s troubles and its self-government; her introduction of monetarism into the budget, so as to reduce inflation in the British economy; the her personal relationship to the United States, particularly with Reagan; and how to deal with what Moore calls the Tory ‘Wets’, the large group of men in the party, in its higher positions, who were indistinguishable from Labour men, who were eventually purged. She also began her quarrel with the Unions, who were said, in those times, to rule the country.
We also find, three of four constant and unusual features of the woman, which are not what we would have expected. Her unreadiness for the task of being party leader is apparent: it was simply her turn, and she was in the right place at the right time; her reliance on other people for her ideas and culture, because although she was relatively well-read, she was a shopkeeper’s daughter after all; her bedrock nationalism, which Moore describes as ‘her extraordinary courage and clarity’; her cautious politician’s way of getting a result, by compromising or choosing the right moment to attack, knowing when to merely talk and delay; her status as an attractive woman in a man’s world, and how she used this so as to get consensus and a loyal set of supporters and advisors. Her solitary leadership among so many Tory ‘Wets’, which seems to me to embody something like faith, belief, in her destiny and her self.
The image with which the book finishes, is the most significant, namely, the dinner at Guildhall, following the victory in the Falkland Isles. Moore has pointed out, that Margaret Thatcher alone made the recapture of the islands possible and draws attention to the “astonishing extent of her isolation during the Falklands War” (697). Prior to that event, it is likely that the party would have worked to remove her, and that she would not have survived the next election. The cuts which she had made in the 1981 Budget, in order to reduce inflation, and to reduce the need for Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR), were seen by the Wets as potentially leading to the destruction of the party, because she was sacrificing too much for the sake of reducing inflation.
It is noteworthy that Thatcher was not in favour of a large Welfare state, and spoke of the ‘piggy bank society’, where citizens were workless yet paid by the state, with disdain bordering on horror. But she did not ever reduce Welfare itself. She also did not like immigration to the country; but she lived at a time when it was under control. She only fought the battles which she could win, and only at the time when it was possible to do so.
Moore does not so much tell us what Thatcher, Powell, Joseph believed; nor what their theory of monetarism was, exactly. Rather, we find out, who was at the exhaustive list of meetings where these things were worked out; the dates, the places; and what was written in diaries, reports, and newspaper headlines of the time. It is thus that, it seems an entire chapter devoted to the 1981 Budget, entitled ‘Cuts’, does not go into much, if any, detail, about what was affected by these ‘cuts’, outside Westminster.
Excepting the Falklands war (not officially designated as a war at the time, to avoid any international reaction consequent on a declaration of war), Thatcher managed the country as her predecessors had done. We find out how Saatchi and Saatchi ran the 1979 publicity campaign; how many of her speeches were uninspiring at conference; how Ronald Reagan had an older man’s affection for her, an excitement about being in her presence. I would suppose that volume two of his biography will present us with a more dangerous and powerful, radical prime minister.
On the basis of a war which, among politicians at home and abroad, she alone had fought, and won, she was in later years free to win elections, and to do more or less what she wanted, unopposed. And, whatever it was that she was about to do, it would be based on a sort of primeval emotional attachment to Britain and to economic survival, which were the immovable centre of her activity and her character.
I conclude with some mention of her glorious prejudices, which unavoidably led to a direct confrontation with mainstream British political culture, where she savaged her opponents mercilessly. One of them can be seen in her only slowly growing awareness of the danger of the EEC or the ‘EU’. In an interview held during her first term, she was asked about her feelings for the ‘United States of Europe’:
“‘That has never, I believe, been the practical intention,’ she said. In fact, for most of those at the heart of the project, that was indeed the intention. According to Sir Michael Jenkins, who at that time worked with Roy Jenkins, the President of the Commission, ‘The Commission was trying to create a United States of Europe – with a common currency and a constitution,’ and most of the relevant people in the British Foreign Office were of a like mind” (p. 487).
I suppose she was able to successfully resist the growth of the EU during her time in office, because, unlike her opponents, she told the truth about what she was doing, and wore her opinions and her heart on her sleeve.
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