The renaissance of Thatcherism

The death of Margaret Thatcher has prompted the wholly expected battle over her legacy, evident from the way the newspapers of the right and left have chosen to memorialise her. The obituaries concentrate, entirely reasonably, on the past struggles that she fought, and her rightful place in history. The greatest woman in British history since Queen Elizabeth I, or the destroyer of “close-knit mining communities”? (Of course it’s perfectly possible to be both.) Yet whatever the verdict of history turns out to be—and even if it unexpectedly embraces the vituperative stance adopted by Ken Livingstone and George Galloway yesterday—I believe that that in a sense it is too late. Interest in her life and message is growing, and will continue to grow.

There have been relatively few prime ministers who can be termed weather-makers in British postwar history—perhaps only Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher truly fit that description. Certainly, other than Winston Churchill and Tony Blair there are no premiers who are so instantly recognisable to an American audience that the actor playing them could win an Oscar. Some premiers are almost instantly forgotten after their deaths: how many references are made in today’s politics to Andrew Bonar Law, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath or Jim Callaghan? Who believes that John Major or Gordon Brown will “live for the ages” once they’ve gone? Yet we can already be certain that Margaret Thatcher will not be one of those. Could any of the aforementioned premiers have been the subject of a movie played by the male equivalent of a Hollywood star as famous as Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher was in The Iron Lady?

While several Thatcherite friends of mine deeply deplored the film for its insistence of concentrating on Lady Thatcher’s post-premiership physical frailties rather than her great moral and political strengths, it nonetheless heralded a very welcome recrudescence of interest in her and the causes for which she stood. Margaret Thatcher appointed me to take her place on the body that owns and curates her archive, the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust. Chris Collins, the director of her website, tells me that it is receiving a hugely increased number of hits each month. One million pages of her papers have so far been digitised at vast expense by the Trust, and these are being put online as soon as Whitehall’s 30-year rule for national security allows. Only last month the British media was rightfully transfixed by our releases that proved that Lady Thatcher forced through the sending of the Task Force to liberate the Falklands against considerable Cabinet scepticism.

With Charles Moore’s definitive biography of Lady Thatcher—which had to await her death—in the pipeline, and a new nightclub called Maggie’s recently having been opened in her honour—though she was never a nightclubbing kind of woman—there has been a broad renaissance of interest in what she achieved in saving Britain from dropping into the third division of nation-states back in the 1980s.

The growing fascination with Thatcher as a historical figure is very evident at Churchill College, Cambridge, where her papers are kept and where last year no fewer than 629 files of material were requested by researchers into such esoteric student dissertation subjects as “The Fashioning of Margaret Thatcher 1974-79” and “The German Social Market Economy and Economic Social Development in the Conservative Party 1975-79.” Almost every week there are visits to her archive from undergraduate history groups, summer schools, business organisations and others such as the Friends of the Imperial War Museum and the National Churchill Museum of the United States. Perhaps surprisingly for so doughty an anti-communist, she for some reason enjoys a huge following in China, and several Chinese delegations—including the ambassador—have visited her papers in Cambridge.

The decision to decommission Britain’s two aircraft carriers in 2020 casts doubt on whether another operation to relieve the Falkland Islands could be successful, and in that sense Thatcher’s shadow falls over the present defence cuts of the coalition government. Should a future government lose the Falklands to a reinvigorated Argentina, whose president and press was still making aggressively threatening noises at the time of the 30^th anniversary of the islands’ liberation last year, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher might even intervene in active politics after her death.

Tory conviction politics of the kind that Thatcher personified throughout the 1980s are next to impossible when the party is forced to govern in a coalition, something she never had to do (and would probably have been dreadful at). That in itself might explain part of this tangible groundswell of nostalgia for the certainties of the 1980s, an era where in General Galtieri, Bobby Sands, Arthur Scargill, Michael Foot, Jacques Delors and Neil Kinnock the Conservatives were able to identify opponents whose smiting united the party in celebration. Politics then did not call for the subtleties it does today.

With Thatcher’s death, the left must face the fact that if they continue to refuse to embrace Tony Blair as one of their “greats,” they will have no one since Clement Attlee to place beside the Tory Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. A party needs some great leaders in its past, and looking back to Attlee alone means admitting that it has elected none since he took over the party in 1935, over three-quarters of a century ago. What an indictment of a political party that it can throw up great men—Hugh Gaitskell, Ernie Bevin, Aneurin Bevan, even Michael Foot in his own way—but none that could win re-election as premier except the fatally slippery and uncharismatic Wilson, who Labour also refuse to raise to its pantheon, and Tony Blair, who is treated as almost as much of a renegade as Ramsay MacDonald.

Tories have no such problem due to Margaret Thatcher, and the increasing interest in her life and ideas makes me suspect that Thatcherism is an idea whose time has come again.