Posted on 04/10/2008 5:54:08 PM PDT by blam
Margaret Thatcher: The patriot who vanquished failure
Last Updated: 12:02am BST 11/04/2008
After decades of decline, Margaret Thatcher's leadership brought courage and conviction to a nation that had grown used to second best, says Charles Moore
On the day in 1982 that the British task force set sail to recover the Falkland Islands from the Argentine invaders, Margaret Thatcher was asked on television: "If you fail, would you feel obliged to resign?" "Failure?" she answered, "Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? 'Failure - the possibilities do not exist'."
The remark goes to the heart of Mrs Thatcher's essential political message, and of her character. It shows her romantic patriotism, her confidence in her own sex, and her dauntlessness.
Margaret Thatcher makes a speech in 1975 at the Tory Campaign to keep Britain in the Common Market, as Ted Heath looks on
Failure had been the dominant experience of the British political class since 1945. After the exhaustion of war had come the painful business of extricating ourselves from empire. From the early Sixties was added relative economic decline.
Many people decided that failure was something Britain was rather good at, and took a perverse pride in it. Mandarins spoke of "the orderly management of decline". Satirists spoke of Britain "sinking giggling into the sea".
Such attitudes were always anathema to Mrs Thatcher's temperament and beliefs. Her father, Alfred Roberts - Methodist lay preacher, grocer, Grantham alderman - taught her that work was a duty owed to God.
"Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can", said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, a quotation of which Mrs Thatcher was fond. In such a world view, failure was not something to be indulged, let alone celebrated. If you failed, you let down yourself, your neighbours, and your God.
In her own early life, Margaret Roberts saw her father's precepts fulfilled. In their small town, he rose by his own efforts. She rose by hers. Alfred Roberts had been forced through family poverty to leave school at 14. He had no sons.
His second daughter fulfilled the dreams of education which he had had for himself. To his great credit, and against the prevailing spirit of the time, he always encouraged her in this.
She won a place at Oxford in 1943. And when she got there, unlike some of the upwardly mobile who happily relinquish the puritan work ethic and turn to pleasure-seeking, she worked harder than ever, at chemistry by day, at politics by night.
It would be wrong to think, though, that this ambitious young woman had at that time the radical vision which she eventually brought to politics.
Although she was unconventional in her determination to conquer the male world of the House of Commons, she was conventionally conservative in her attitudes. She believed in the British Empire as a civilising force, and in the Conservative Party as its political guarantor.
She accepted straightforwardly the Churchillian narrative of the Second World War. She was greatly shocked by the Labour landslide of 1945 ("How could they do this to Winston?"). She believed that the remedy for Britain's ills was, very simply, a Tory government.
When she entered the House of Commons in 1959 and became a junior minister in Harold Macmillan's government not long after, she was uncritically loyal. Even when she joined Ted Heath's Cabinet in 1970 as Secretary of State for Education, she did not seriously question the direction of policy.
It was only because of the economic U-turn, which produced inflation, and the Tory defeat in the general election of February 1974, which was called because of the confrontation with the miners' union, that Mrs Thatcher became restless.
For the first time, her belief in the natural capacity of the Conservative Party to run the country faltered. She came to think that Britain was, though she would not have used the phrase, going to hell in a handcart. She saw the possibility of failure, and she hated it.
You could say that it was failure that gave her her big chance. If things had been going better, the Tory party would not have turned to an outsider. Its ruling elite would have continued to rule and Mrs Thatcher would have been their useful work-horse, staying only at the top of the second rank of power. They turned to her only in desperation.
It is probably true, as Mrs Thatcher has always asserted, that, until 1974, she did not dare to think of herself as a possible leader of her party. She had assumed that her sex made this impossible; her highest ambition had been to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
But as her hero Keith Joseph imploded in the course of the summer, she came to believe not only that Heath must be challenged, but that she could be the challenger. In November, she went to see Heath to tell him her decision. The awkward interview was short. "You'll lose," he said.
She won, of course. Once she had done so, the fact that she was a woman, which before had seemed to be a disadvantage, began to work in her favour. The world's media were fascinated, and so gave her the sort of coverage of which most opposition leaders can only dream.
The message of change and difference was there from the start, visible and thrilling. The handbag was to become the most potent symbol of power since the invention of the orb and sceptre.
Mrs Thatcher grabbed the opportunity the media afforded, even though the best offer came from the most unlikely source. In 1976, after she had given an unfashionably sombre warning about Soviet expansionism, she was attacked by the Red Army newspaper, Red Star.
She was the "Iron Lady", it said, intending an insult. She took it as a compliment: "I stand before you tonight in my, yes, red, chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved.
Thatcher in a family portrait with her parents and older sister
The Iron Lady of the Western world? Me? A Cold War warrior? Well, yes - if that is how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life". As she hoped, the nickname stuck.
Again, it was failure - this time the Winter of Discontent of 1978/9 - which put the Iron Lady where she wanted to be. Until then, the voters consistently, on a personal level, preferred the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan to her.
She had been persuaded by Heathite colleagues to rein in her desire for reform. Only when the country descended into industrial collapse did she feel confident enough to preach her message of urgent change.
And even then, she shared only a small percentage of her ideas about reducing trade union power with the voters before her victory in May 1979. With her, caution was almost as strong a factor as courage. She passionately wanted to do the right thing, but she also understood that a successful politician must also pick the right time.
When she came into office, it was, again, her hatred of failure which sustained Mrs Thatcher through the difficulties which had overwhelmed her predecessors.
She made grave mistakes, deepening recession and increasing unemployment with high interest rates without, at first, getting government spending under control. She quickly became unpopular, and most of her colleagues thought she would not survive politically.
But as I talk to those who worked closely with her and study the scrawls she wrote on the endless paper which crossed her desk, I see that the sense of direction was always maintained.
With most prime ministers - look at the situation today - there was little point to anything. With Margaret Thatcher, the point was endlessly repeated, the end kept always in view. You knew, as people nowadays say, where she was coming from; and you also knew, because she did, where she was going.
Statistics show that her economic policies were already bearing fruit before war came suddenly out of the dull grey sky of the South Atlantic in April 1982; but there is no doubt that the dramatic failure of policy which produced the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands gave Mrs Thatcher the best chance she ever had.
She never allowed the complexity of the crisis to overcome her basic, immediate, human and patriotic reaction. The invasion was a terrible humiliation, and it had led to the subjugation of free, British people.
It therefore could not be allowed to stand. Although she was supple in negotiation and devastated by every loss of British life, she was utterly determined.
After she announced victory late at night to the House of Commons, she, Denis and senior colleagues retired for a celebratory drink on the premises. Her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, proposed a toast. He said that only she could have led the country to victory. This was the case: it was a question of character.
That character, of course, was not an unmixed blessing. There is no doubt that her growing disregard for the feelings of her Cabinet ministers turned enough of them against her to do her in eight years later.
In later years, her growing self-confidence too often got the better of her natural carefulness.
The poll tax was the most famous example of that. In the great battles over Europe, she was surely on the right side, but she lost her earlier ability to get what she wanted and took us into the Exchange Rate Mechanism which she so detested. Her last stand - against the reunification of Germany - was forlorn. Events began to pass her by.
But because she did not countenance failure, she changed the way her country thought about itself. This had a global effect - whether in policy exports such as privatisation, or in the example of what a woman can achieve.
Before Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives prided themselves as masters of what RA Butler called "the art of the possible". This led to complacency. Margaret Thatcher perfected something else - the art of the impossible. The world noticed, and it will not forget.
Beloved Lady Thatcher ... and Hillary has the audacity to claim “firsts.”
I loved how she referred to Reagan as Ronnie ... they were a pair for the times .... Bush and Blair came close ... but I’m afraid we’ll have to learn a new word .... ENTROPY.
Thank you for the link ... giants walked the earth in my lifetime.
bump for later
Well said.
There are some among us today. But nobody ever calls them that until they aren't around to hear it...
Could you ever imagine Maggie Thatcher crying or pulling the gender card to sway voters? Hillary Clinton would have the presence of a gnat in Maggie’s company!
Ping...
hillary clinton is a pathological, lying, stealing, amoral, two bit hustler prepared to accept public humiliation in her marriage in her lust for power.
There is NO comparison.
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