Remember, it took the Wets to make Thatcher what she was

ON MAY 3, 1979, Margaret Thatcher took her place in Downing Street, and the battle for her place in history began. She vanquished her enemies long ago, yet that place is still in danger. Her reputation must be protected from the imagination of her friends. To a far greater extent than has become the lazy assumption, Thatcherism was a corporate enterprise. There was never any doubt who was in the driving seat — she was — but we are in danger of forgetting the other navigators. They were not for the most part her ideological soulmates. Many were those she called the Wets. Without them her project would have foundered, and their contribution went further than turning her wishes into plans and restraining her wilder impulses: these men generated ideas, some of them alien to her own, some of them as bold as her own, and among her Government’s greatest successes. That Tory moderates were the brake where she was the engine is only half the truth. They also helped her to steer.

Latterly, a Thatcherite cult has been born. Through its eyes her years in government are now seen as the beginning of a struggle at whose end only the devout stayed true, to carry the Ark of the Covenant into the next generation. We all love a simple narrative but that is not how it was. “Thatcherism” as today portrayed by its ultras bears little relation to the hybrid and flexible force that defined the years in which Margaret Thatcher was really making a difference to the world. That story defies theorists who seek a pure doctrinal thread to trace back through the years. All the threads are broken.

Carry yourself back to the late 1970s and early 80s. Names and contributions spring forward: serious players, heavyweight figures in Thatcher’s early Cabinets whose achievements we now overlook. We remember Michael Heseltine because of his spectacular bust-up with his Prime Minister, but we are less likely to remember his enterprise zones and development corporations. Yet what more tangible a symbol can there be to what we now call Thatcherism than regeneration in Merseyside, or the magnificent skyline of Canary Wharf in London?

It is not a skyline that would be there without people such as Michael Heseltine. The whole concept of regeneration sat uneasily with Margaret Thatcher’s instincts, which were viscerally opposed to state intervention of any sort. She was never an enthusiast for such schemes, and was talked into them only as sops. She would have taken some persuading that a handful of places in the United Kingdom should be given privileges as business-tax-free zones. Her instinct would have been that if tax breaks were right for some they were right for all.

We think of the “right to buy” as central, too, to Thatcherism. No more important and permanent social change characterises the Thatcher years than the opportunity given to millions of fellow citizens to become property owners. When I entered politics, about half the nation were tenants of the State, an arrangement that entrenched and embittered the class divide and disfigured housing with virtual encampments of state-tenants in uniform properties with uniform front doors. Nothing better exemplified Two-Nations Britain.

All that has changed. Certainly it would not have changed without Margaret Thatcher’s forceful championing of the legislation. But it was not her kind of thing. She had to be persuaded. She did not see why anyone should be given the right to buy government property for a fraction of its market value. “What about the poor people who’ve paid full price for their houses in the private sector?” she would ask. Selling council houses was neither a new nor a specifically Thatcherite idea, but the massive discounts were, and it was people such as that arch Wet, Peter Walker, who championed this in Cabinet — against the free marketeers.

Or take industrial relations. Thatcherism’s step-by-step approach to whittling away the powers of the unions, picking each battle carefully and on limited ground, should be a textbook case for other European governments today; but left to herself and the company of ministers she regarded as “sound” she would never have done it that way. It is to her employment spokesman in Opposition and Employment Secretary in government, Jim Prior, and to his Wet allies in Cabinet, that the patience and judgment critical to this success are owed. Other names and other achievements spring to mind. Nobody less fair and painstaking than Patrick Jenkin, Thatcher’s first Secretary for Health and Social Security, could have pushed through the cuts in welfare spending that helped to fund Thatcher’s epoch-making shifts in the balance between the private and the public sector. His successor, Norman Fowler, commanded the most prompt and enlightened response to Aids by any nation in the world.

In Opposition, the late John Davies calmed inflammatory language about the Soviet Union — “doing business” with communist leaders later was distinctly Thatcherism Mark 2 — and Peter Tapsell helped to talk her out of going into battle for Ian Smith in Rhodesia.

In government, Peter Carrington eased Britain out of that African arena. A post-imperial spasm in Central Africa could have wrecked her domestic ambitions, just as Iraq has now wrecked Tony Blair’s.

How Mr Blair could have done with Cabinet heavyweights such as Lord Carrington. But it is a feature of Thatcher-in-practice that her modern cult-followers overlook, that, rude and forceful as she was with colleagues, she understood Cabinet government. Her manner may have been despotic, but other politicians, other egos, other careers and other ideas did not wilt in proximity to her, as seems to have been the case with the present Prime Minister.

The late William Whitelaw steadied the ship through many storms. She berated him mercilessly and depended upon him absolutely. She never sacked a colleague on an issue of policy. She assembled — and abused, and kept — a team that equipped Thatcherism for survival.

And would she even have won that general election 25 years ago with the Commons majority she needed without Chris Patten and the network of pragmatic senior colleagues whom his Conservative Research Department serviced? The Right Approach, the party’s leading document on economic policy at the time of the election, was studiedly unideological. The Tories’ great terror during their years in Opposition before 1979 has now been completely forgotten: it was that they would be made to look extreme and unable to work with the trade unions. Forthright? Bold? Clearcut? She and her colleagues were anything but, she knew it had to be that way, and (grumbling all the while) she employed men such as Patten to steer her a middle course.

I do not overlook the role of the ideological Right in her decade in power. Without it, her administration would have been salt without savour. Without thinkers such as the late Sir Keith Joseph or communicators such as Norman Tebbit, and without her shrewd and powerful reactionary instincts and her own sheer nerve, Thatcherism could well have lost its drive.

But without the Wets it would have lost its wheels. She kept trying to promote right-wingers to her junior ministerial ranks, and to advance right-wingers in Cabinet, but with only a few exceptions they were simply not viable as administrators and practical politicians. Time and again, and at every ministerial level, the instincts and competence of the moderates rescued her.

In her final years in office it all turned into a kind of pantomime, and she into a political Widow Twankey. The Wets broke away; she reviled them; they (as she saw it) betrayed her. You cannot now expect her to acknowledge or praise their contribution to her earlier success, and perhaps you cannot expect them now to call themselves Thatcherites.

But the result is a travesty of the years which led to it. Baroness Thatcher has ended up surrounded (some would say captured) by the ultra-loyalists. I do not belittle the loyalties of young “Thatcherite” activists who were still in nappies when Thatcherism drove a real government in a real world, or of politicians such as Gerald Howarth, John Redwood, Bill Cash or Norman Lamont; but these people were nothing — or minnows — in her Government.

Thatcherism in practice was a subtler force than can be represented by a coachload from the Monday Club mooning at Romano Prodi, or tea and sympathy with General Pinochet. Margaret Thatcher had 11 years to get us out of the European Community. She would never have dreamt of anything so silly.

As his mental illness took hold, Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, her husband and some of their associates, hijacked the demented philo- sopher’s teachings, turned him into a supposed anti-Semite, dressed him in white robes, and carted him round Germany as a sort of mascot for a crude doctrine that had nothing to do with his true legacy. A quarter of a century after the inauguration of the most important and successful premiership in postwar Britain, and 14 years after its end, I hope that Thatcherism may avoid a similar fate. If you want to know what the 20th-century Margaret Thatcher achieved and she meant, steer clear of her 21st-century friends.

Solipsistic posting, but for those who are too lazy [ ; - ) ] to follow the link here are the pertinent passages. The interview was made in 1991:

"I was still prime minister last summer, of course," she recalled wistfully, "and was attending a conference in Aspen, Colorado, with president Bush. When I heard about the invasion of Kuwait I went to see him in his suite. He asked me, 'Now, Margaret, what's your view?' I told him I had experienced aggression in the Falklands, so I had no doubt how to deal with an aggressor.

"Aggressors had to be stopped, thrown out, destroyed. And when he began to chew this over, I said, 'Look George, this is no time to be wobbly. No half-measures. Liberate Kuwait. Go into Iraq. Destroy Saddam Hussein and his National Guard utterly. Britain will be by your side.'"

Her voice suddenly acquired a serrated edge: "George Bush promised me two things," she said grimly. "He promised to destroy the Iraqi forces, and he promised to capture Saddam Hussein and have him tried as a war criminal. Well, as far as I am concerned, what happened in fact.... "

She was interrupted in mid-sentence by the little servant's cough of her maid, who had obsequiously entered the room to hand her a note. Thatcher shot her a sharp glance, read the note with ferocious concentration and, rising, said, "You'll have to excuse me a moment. I have to take a call in the study."

She strode to the door, opened it, paused, turned, and glowered back, "So yes, what happened in fact is that George Bush failed on both counts. He neither destroyed the National Guard, nor did he capture Saddam Hussein."

She said this with an emphatic lifting of the head and a lowering of the eyelids for added veracity. Then, with a cold, hard stare, she walked back into the room, laid a confiding finger on my arm, and said, "I've telephoned Number 10 only once since leaving, and that's when I saw what savagery Saddam Hussein was inflicting on the Kurds and the Shi'ites.

"I simply could not hold my tongue. They were doing exactly what George Bush had asked them to do – rise up against Saddam Hussein – and then he left them hanging in the lurch.

"And I'll tell you something else." Her whole demeanor had risen in vehement severity. "George was badly advised. James Baker [secretary of state] is no Henry Kissinger. Jimmy Baker is a lawyer from Texas. He operates like a lawyer from Texas. He doesn't make policy, he makes deals. I suspect he thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus."

And, with that, she spun on her heel and stalked out to take her call.

In the sudden stillness I gazed about me and noted the fantasies of power that still clung to her in a room that was a feast of opulence: the large oil painting above the fireplace – a statuesque Thatcherite image in full evening regalia – the silver sculpture on the table engraved with the names of her cabinet, the huge plain silver bowl next to it inscribed as a parting gift from her parliamentary constituency, and a needle-worked cushion on an armchair depicting the front door of Number 10.

'NOW, WHERE were we?" Thus Thatcher shuffling back into the room, minutes later. "Ah yes," she reminded herself, "George!"

She stood staring hard out of the French window, her arms folded, her shoulders stooped, her features fixed in a pose of melodramatic pugnacity, saying nothing – a nothing that said everything, a nothing that said: "If only I was still prime minister, everything would be different."

When she finally spoke her voice was thin, worn, resigned.

"I was unseated at the critical moment," she lamented, "just when George needed all my backing to keep his nerve. But he faltered. The Scud strike on the barracks in Saudi Arabia that killed 36 Americans – that's what broke his nerve.

"He became obsessed with casualties. He tried to win the war from high altitudes, where everything is clean and sterile. His air campaign demoralized the Iraqi army, true, so that when the ground forces went in they cut through Kuwait to Baghdad like a knife through butter.

"But instead of finishing off the job by destroying the National Guard and capturing Saddam Hussein, George declared a premature victory."

"So there we have it," she concluded, her face stiffening into an effigy of contempt: "I'm out of office, George is having to fight a reelection himself that he may not win, and that tyrant is sitting pretty in Baghdad ready to fight another day.

"Mark my words, Saddam Hussein shall yet be back to haunt us."

Vintage Thatcher!

In one of the following posts Stultis made an in my view very shrewd comment regarding Baker:

To: SJackson "And I'll tell you something else." Her whole demeanor had risen in vehement severity. "George was badly advised. James Baker [secretary of state] is no Henry Kissinger. Jimmy Baker is a lawyer from Texas. He operates like a lawyer from Texas. He doesn't make policy, he makes deals. I suspect he thinks Sinai is the plural of sinus."

By all accounts Baker is a ruthless, infighting @$$hole obsessed with defending his turf: A very dangerous man to invest with personal power, but a very valuable tool if used properly and carefully. It speaks volumes about the younger Bush that he has done the later to great effect. When he's need a Guido type who could negotiate a good deal under tough circumstance (forgiveness of Iraqi debt) or no-holds barred street fighter (Floriduh 2000) he's turned to Baker, but hasn't put him in a leadership position within the administration. 8 posted on 01/27/2004 2:37:16 PM EST by Stultis

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