Margaret Thatcher’s Character and Legacy

I was a member of the Tory Party before Thatcher took control of it and purged it of conservatives, turning it into a neo-liberal cabal. There are damned few Tories left in it today.

From The European Conservative

By Robin Harris

Some conservatives may sniff and say that there is more to a country’s welfare than its growth rate. They are right. But without prosperity, life is to varying degrees unpleasant.

It is a pleasure and an honour to be asked to speak to you about my former boss—and New Direction‘s first patron—Margaret Thatcher.

Some would say she was a very odd patron for European Conservatives, since she is remembered for being incredibly rude about Brussels.

She would certainly have supported Brexit. Despite some argument, I know that was her view, because she told me. I don’t believe that the outcome, particularly the huge increase in immigration, which Brexit was meant to control, would have pleased her. But, anyway, there is more to be said about her view than where it finished up.

Mrs. Thatcher was sincere in wanting Europe to be a success. But what she wanted the European Common Market to be was not what most of the other states eventually wanted. Her British successors then gave up on the battle to steer Europe away from centralism. If she had remained a few more months in office, she would have vetoed the Maastricht Treaty. That would have allowed Britain to remain within the existing framework, while others integrated further under new treaties. Brexit would, therefore, have been unnecessary. In this sense, she would have kept Britain in Europe.

The important text for all this, if now only as an inspiration, is her Bruges Speech to the College of Europe in 1988. I had a hand in it. Read it, and you will see that it is not anti-European. In fact, in the speech she extolls Europe’s legacy and values, especially those of Christendom. She adds that “Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome.” She calls for cooperation between independent sovereign states and makes clear that nationhood must not be devalued. She says it is “folly” to attempt creating what she called an “identikit European personality.” That is what virtually all right-of-centre Europeans believe today.

The Bruges speech was also ahead of its time in reaching out explicitly to Europeans living in the thrall of Communism. “East of the Iron Curtain,” she said, “people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom, and identity have been cut off from their roots,” She added that “we shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.” This a different language from that employed by the Little Europeans then, and now.

After the Berlin War crumbled, Mrs Thatcher visited Eastern Europe whenever she could. The visits to Poland were simply electric. She never lost her concern for how the ex-Communist countries fared. It was her love for Croatia which, indirectly, explains why I now live there. She changed many lives.

She did not always make life easier, it must be said. She was a demanding, difficult, occasionally infuriating boss. But working with her gave you a sense of purpose.

Thatcher and feminism

Margaret Thatcher was extremely clever, though in a literal, not an imaginative way. She had a phenomenal grasp of facts. She worked ridiculous hours to acquire it. She was intensely serious, though she could enjoy a joke—if it was explained to her—and came up with a lot of inadvertently funny remarks. You can find many online if you google. Some I don’t recognise, some I think have little basis of fact, but others I do remember—like this earthily feminist observation: “It may be the cock that crows, but it’s the hen that lays the eggs.”

Which brings me to the rather obvious fact that Margaret Thatcher was a woman. Perceptions of the importance of that have changed. At one time, it was the only half-good thing that the Left could say about her—that she made it easier for a woman to get to the top. I can only say that this was not her intention. She believed that merit—brains, hard work, ability—should be rewarded, but she was always against state intervention to promote the interests of women or indeed any other group.

In her day, there were very few women who got to be prime ministers. The only other significant one was Indira Ghandhi, who was not a good advertisement. Nowadays, in our politically correct world, women have not just been promoted, but in many cases obviously over-promoted. Just look at the European Commission. Feminist reverse discrimination now can be seen as just the first—but not the last—wave of social engineering, which will shortly see menstruating men and muscle-bound women telling us all what to do.

Since Mrs. Thatcher, we have witnessed that women, like men, can be good and bad at leading countries. Germany’s Angela Merkel must be reckoned as one of the most disastrous European leaders of the post-War era. New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern turned out to be a red-cultist incompetent. Against which, Italy’s current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is terrific—an inspiration.

Debate and character

Another Thatcher quotation you can find online which strikes me as authentic is: “I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone to just sit there and agree with me.”

I first came face to face with her at a meeting she held with government political advisers, when I was at the Home Office, in the early 1980s. Most of them did, indeed, “just sit there,” but when the prime minister said something spectacularly silly—it was about crime levels—I disagreed and explained why our policies had been too soft and why more use of imprisonment was required. From that point on, she supported me—she saw I could hold my own, that I had a point of view, and most important it was one even to the right of hers. Later the directorship of the Conservative Party’s Research Department fell vacant. The Party bureaucrats said that it must be advertised as open to anyone wanting to apply. She reluctantly agreed, but added that after everyone had been interviewed, “Robin must get the job”—and I did.

I then had the exhausting privilege of helping her write her speeches. She would seek drafts from different people. She would then try to rearrange them, cutting out what seemed to her repetition. She also disliked adverbs and even adjectives because they struck her as frivolous or redundant. Then, having removed anything of interest, she would sadly say—with paper now covering the table and much of the floor—“Oh, Robin, it’s dull, we must start again!” And so we did.

In this process you got to hear about, and even occasionally contribute to, policies on just about everything—social security, tax, defence matters, foreign affairs. Most of those involved are now dead. Only John O’Sullivan and I are still around as survivors. She was fond of us, and kind to us; she once said that there must be something in Catholicism that allowed people like us to write so well. But just when your head started to swell, she would add, “of course you are commentators, we [meaning I] do things”—which was no more than the truth.

The point I want to leave with you is that this nerve-racking process allowed insight into her character.

Thatcher’s thought and personality

She believed that in politics—and, more particularly in whatever constitutes statesmanship—it is character that finally counts. I am sure she was right. Her character saw her, and the rest of the country, through the crises that marked her years in power.

At one level, Margaret Thatcher was simple. She was not subtle. She was not good at concealing her feelings, and she talked so much that it would anyway have proved impossible. She had certain fundamental beliefs. They were neither as generalised nor as theoretical as philosophical principles, but rather deep instinctive convictions about what was true and false, and right and wrong. It would be time consuming and artificial to try to compile a list of them, since you would have to trawl her speeches, and then explain the context. These convictions came from her middle-class Methodist background, growing up in a modest town in the Midlands. The more sophisticated views she imbibed from people like Hayek and Friedman either fitted into these beliefs or were not absorbed at all.

Margaret Thatcher was a romantic patriot. She was proud of the British Empire, she knew hundreds of lines of Kipling (its preeminent bard), and, of course, she finally fought a war to deal with one of its distant leftovers in the South Atlantic—what I refuse—even in Spain—to describe as “Las Malvinas.”

Mrs. Thatcher took a harsh view about people who wanted something for nothing. She was contemptuous of those who tried to practise what is nowadays called ‘virtue signalling,’ wallowing in compassion, usually at the taxpayer’s expense.

Having this outlook, it was easy to pillory her as uncaring. It did no lasting harm. The opinion polls show that people do not expect right-wing governments to be caring, they want them to be effective. They need to respect right-wing politicians, not like them. The public never thought Mrs. Thatcher was compassionate, but they did think she was tough, competent, and honest.

In fact, as a person she was much better than that. I have found by experience that right-wingers are usually nicer than left-wingers, while the worst of all are the self-conscious centrists. Perhaps one reason is that life is difficult if you are right-wing, and so you are more likely to be sincere. That helps. Personal behaviour matters in politics. If you are facing attacks on every side, you need to have a devoted and loyal team to help you. You cannot build one up, if you are—forgive the expression—an A-One-Bastard.

Mrs. Thatcher had an enormous personality. She ‘filled the room.’ She was charismatic and charming. She also sometimes gave way to the tension and was ferocious—frightening even. She humiliated some of her colleagues, and they being men and she a woman probably made it harder for them to forgive. But her team and her friends stayed loyal. This was because she was kind, generous, sensitive, practical, and uncensorious when they were in trouble.

Saying this makes me a bit nostalgic. It seems a long time ago since she left us—though it is in fact just ten years. She had been out of the public eye before that, of course. The funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral was a typical Thatcher event—stylish and full of surprises. The BBC broadcast a warning beforehand that those attending could expect trouble. There were a few left-wing ‘death parties,’ at one of which a trade union leader’s wife danced up and down like a deranged witch on a mock up Thatcher depiction.

But the most amazing moment that day in St Paul’s was when the great doors swung open to admit the coffin, and a roar of sound engulfed the church—it was a milling mass of supporters who had struggled past security cordons to say their final, affectionate farewell.

Thatcher’s political life

An opinion poll at the time of her death showed that people thought Margaret Thatcher was the greatest post-War British Prime Minister, ahead of Churchill. I doubt whether another poll today would show differently.

Of course, the world now looks very different to the one she knew, and so often dominated.

It is the style of politics that has changed most. Every generation bewails what follows it, but who could pretend that today’s political world is not more superficial, more subservient to the media, more focused on personal trivia? A lot of that change is down to technology, but it also reflects the desire of the mainstream centre-right parties, including the British Conservative Party, to marginalise those in their ranks who have beliefs. And the marginalised voters then express their rage by backing radical Right parties—some good, some not so good—as the only way to uphold what used to be conservatism.

The word that springs to mind, if I am asked to say what made Margaret Thatcher so different both from many of her colleagues and most politicians today, is that she was “authentic.”

She was highly professional in taking advice. But in the end, she did what she wanted. This made her unpredictable and sometimes unmanageable and got her into trouble. But even what were thought of as gaffes had their uses.

Take just one example. In 1978, so still in opposition, there was heightened concern about the level of immigration. It was a sensitive topic—though when you look at the figures then compared with the immigration deluge now drowning us, you wonder why. Anyway, the old guard of the Conservative Party were terrified of being labelled racist. She wasn’t a racist, but she knew what people thought, and in a television interview she said that people felt the country might be “rather swamped by people with a different culture.”

All Hell broke out. The Party big wigs were outraged. But, lo and behold, the Conservative Party jumped sharply in the opinion polls. From then on, throughout the whole of her time as leader, there was no room for any populist Right-Wing anti-immigrant party. People thought that no one sensible was more right-wing than Margaret Thatcher.

The style of politics has changed, but not all the issues.

Thatcherism today

Every year, I give a lecture to Buckingham University students on the Thatcher era. I use basically the same text. But I always insert an analysis of the issues she had to face that are no longer relevant. This is the section that, every year, I must fundamentally rewrite—because yesterday’s threats do resurface in new forms, and we wish someone like Margaret Thatcher was around to deal with them.

There is a danger in trying to say what Mrs. Thatcher would have thought or done today, but we can be clear what she wouldn’t have thought and wouldn’t have done.

Her greatest achievement was said by many to be the taming of the militant British trade unions and so curing the affliction of damaging strikes. That is true. She did. Yet today Britain is awash with strikes, and no one knows what to do.

She cut back what the state spends, borrows, and takes in tax, to leave room for economic growth. She succeeded. Yet now Britain has the highest levels of tax for seventy years, enormous debt, sluggish productivity—all of which the commentators blame on Brexit rather than the real cause, big state socialist policies applied, and not for the first time, by a Conservative Government.

She brought down inflation—those were the days, remember, when the government, not the Bank of England, decided monetary policy and set interest rates. Inflation increased again at the end of her final term, and she raised interest rates to stop it.

She would never have put John Maynard Keynes back on the throne from which her Friedmanite policies had toppled him. She wouldn’t have swallowed the idea that inflation was no longer a threat because cheap goods from China would keep down prices—even though central banks printed money with abandon, and interest rates plummeted. So, no surprise, today inflation is back with a vengeance.

How exactly she would have reacted to COVID-19 I don’t know. As a scientist, she would have been cautious, though she would have cross-questioned the experts more than ever happened. I certainly don’t believe she would have locked down private enterprise, and then spent and borrowed through the public sector, as if the bills would never have to be paid.

I am similarly unsure what would be her attitude to Russia’s war against Ukraine. On the one hand, she believed that aggression must not be rewarded, because it encourages more aggression—as it has. On the other hand, she would have been more concerned about the nuclear threat—always central to her foreign policy thinking—than today’s Western politicians seem to be. I do not, though, believe that either way she would have allowed the conflict to drag out so long and so dangerously.

The criticism of Margaret Thatcher—or more precisely the approach that she and Ronald Reagan championed—has changed in recent years. The criticism from the Left is not new and need not be taken too seriously. The main objections were that, first, Thatcherism increased inequality. Perhaps it did, but equality of outcomes should not be a conservative objective, and she never pretended it was hers.

Second, it was said that the poor became poorer—in any meaningful sense that is just not true. Relative poverty is again a socialist concept and absolute poverty did not, as far as we know, increase, to the contrary most people got richer.

Third, it was said that the price of economic reforms was too high—because of the disruption caused. If you keep an economy going for years based on subsidies and interventions which are unsustainable, of course the disruption when it ends will be great. But a nation in the condition that Britain was in, when she took over, has just two choices—change or decline—and not just decline relative to other countries but decline absolutely. At that point, order and democracy are under threat.

Thatcher the conservative

Criticism from self-proclaimed conservatives, albeit politely expressed, is more topical. Let me say at once that if these criticisms are substantially correct, then Thatcher’s and Reagan’s faces should be removed from Conservative banners. But thankfully that will not be necessary. Mrs. Thatcher did make mistakes—and I shall come to these shortly—but they were not the egregious ideological errors nowadays ascribed to her.

The new conservative critics are nearly all American. Indeed, this seems to me, and perhaps should seem to all Europeans, like an internal American conservative tiff. The suggestion now is that the fundamental error of the post-War period in the U.S. and the UK, specifically in the 1980s, was to single out socialism as the great enemy, when the real threat was liberalism. Thatcher and Reagan stand condemned for being liberals, or at least unthinkingly pro-liberal, rather than true conservatives.

This seems to me plain wrong. To show exactly why would take me too far off course. I believe, however, that the case made is characterised by misunderstanding of how the free market works, and why interventionism never does, and, above all, by selective amnesia about the threat which socialism and communism represented, and which socialism and Gramscian communism still represent.

Mrs. Thatcher was, indeed, a classical liberal in her economic policies, with a few variations, and a classic national conservative (to use the current phrase) in her foreign policy. In both cases—at home and abroad—she fought socialism which she believed was the threat of the hour. I do not believe that those in Eastern Europe think that between 1945 and 1989 their greatest problem was liberalism. Liberty was what they wanted. Communism was what stood in the way of it.

Liberalism is certainly a distinct philosophy from conservatism, though they overlap. Liberalism comes in different shapes and sizes, some of which now, as in the past, shade into leftism.

Liberalism, in British terms anyway, isn’t so much a corpus of writings by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and others as it is also a convenient shorthand for arrangements and institutions that emerged from great constitutional and political conflicts now settled on the basis of compromise. Limited government, private property, the rule of law, independent courts, freedom of speech, parliamentary institutions, and a free enterprise economy—this is the legacy of Western liberalism. The Western tradition offers much more, and the conservative tradition stresses, for example, the role of religion—but these free institutions and a free market are a central part of the Western historical legacy. Mrs. Thatcher believed in and fought throughout her life for that legacy. She was a conservative, not a closet liberal. The only closet she kept was for her shoes.

Mrs. Thatcher understood something else that her current critics on the Right seem to forget. Strictly limited government is the demonstrably effective condition for prosperity. Conservative governments must create the conditions for people to improve their own and their families’ living standards. That means economic growth, year after year. Many cultural conservatives might like a static society or a static economy, but if they try to produce them, they will lose elections.

Some conservatives may sniff at this and say that there is more to a country’s welfare than its growth rate. They are right. Security is more important. Religion is more important. The family—the traditional family—is more important. But without prosperity, life is to varying degrees unpleasant. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me. And people will not wear it.

Mrs Thatcher never admitted her mistakes. Politicians rarely do—at least sincerely. But she made some; if she had not she would have stayed in power longer. It was the local government tax—the so-called Poll tax—that finished her. The economy had overheated, and the wolves were baying on the European issue. But you cannot get everything right, and in the end her usually good luck deserted her.

The only wholly bad current development for which she can justly be blamed is the climate change obsession. As a scientist, she thought it was a good idea to lecture the world on that subject, which she certainly understood better than most. She later, though, started to regret where it was all leading.

More important are the problems she didn’t address. She allowed the British National Health Service to go largely unreformed. Her successors then permitted it to become sacrosanct—which process COVID-19 completed. It is now set to bankrupt the country.

Both she and Ronald Reagan underestimated the issue of dependency on social benefits and their addictive, demoralising effect. I think the reason for this error is that her generation just could not imagine living off handouts if you did not need to. Shame—stigma—operated. Our society is shameless, and the only remaining stigma is attached to us conservatives.

She would never have conceived of a world of ‘LGBT,’ of ‘BLM,’ of ‘decolonising’ mathematics, and of tearing down national monuments. This revolution uses the language of rights. But whether it is any kind of liberalism is questionable. As Christopher Rufo argues, it is, in truth, the fulfilment of Frankfurt School Marxism.

She would have thought it all mad—but she would have lacked the philosophical resources to fight it. And here the critics of liberalism have a point. The Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, liberal political tradition is ill-equipped to engage in this desperate struggle to save our culture. In predominantly Catholic Europe, we understand the disease and can better suggest remedies.

In politics, you need good policies, clearly expressed, that motivate your base, but you also need good leaders. The trouble is that you never fully know what you are getting until he has been tested.

One thing a leader must have—what Margaret Thatcher had—what is more important even than brains, knowledge, and experience—is raw courage. She had both moral and physical courage, and she needed them.

Without moral courage, she could not have ridden through the personal abuse, overcome Cabinet plots, pushed through trade union reform, reined back spending, defeated the yearlong miners’ strike, won back “our money” (as she outrageously called it) from Europe, or defeated Argentina in the Falklands—all against the odds.

Without physical courage, she would not have helicoptered into border areas of Northern Ireland when the IRA must had her in their sights. Without it, she would have been shattered by the IRA attempt to kill her with the Grand Hotel bomb of 1984 in Brighton. She remained perfectly calm, and she later delivered the speech the terrorists thought they could stop—adding the famous lines, which I now quote:

Our first thoughts must at once be for those who died, and for those who are now in hospital recovering from their injuries. But the bomb attack clearly signified more than this. It was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our Conference. It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government. That is the scale of the outrage in which we have all shared, and the fact that we are gathered here now—shocked but composed and determined—is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.

Amen to that.

Shortly before his death, Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian British Prime Minister, remarked that, “courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public men.” It still is. And without it—you are lost.

This essay has been adapted from a speech given at the Margaret Thatcher Dinner, in memory of New Direction’s founding patron, during the Think Tank Central conference in September, 2023.