Dale Margaret Thatcher

The Prime Ministers Series
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-359-4
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reihe: The Prime Ministers

'A compelling account of a compulsory subject ... A masterpiece of compression and readability' Daniel Finkelstein 'A deft, clear-eyed summary of Thatcher's life' Rory Stewart 'Iain Dale introduces Margaret Thatcher to a new generation and intelligently explodes some of the myths about her' Simon Heffer Margaret Thatcher was a woman of tremendous paradoxes: a conviction politician who was also a pragmatist; someone who delighted in her tough reputation, yet could also be emotional, and even tearful, when confronted by personal or national tragedy. Her reputation as a cabinet leader was one of being quasi-dictatorial, yet she left her ministers to get on with their jobs - far more than any of her successors ever have. She was known as a classical laissez faire liberal, yet she started out as a social conservative, and wasn't averse to state intervention when she felt it was warranted. Iain Dale's sparkling short biography of Margaret Thatcher brings her to life in all her paradoxes and contradictions, and shows how her election in 1979 really was a turning point in British history. Dubbed the 'Iron Lady' by the Soviets, she was one of the few recent prime ministers to burnish an international reputation, fighting the Falklands war, playing a leading role in defeating Communism and winning the Cold War, and through her battles with the European Economic Community. Domestically, she ushered in a period of forty years of consensus on the limited role of the state, an industrial relations settlement and the dominance of the private sector in the economy - a settlement that is only now being seriously questioned. A little over a decade after her death, Margaret Thatcher introduces her to new generations of readers who may not remember her premiership, but who are living with its consequences.

Iain Dale is an accomplished broadcaster, presenting his own daily radio show on LBC, and several podcasts, including 'Where Politics Meets History' and 'Iain Dale All Talk'. He is a regular on Question Time, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, Politics Live and a columnist for the DailyTelegraph. He is the author/editor of more than 50 books, most recently The Presidents, The Prime Ministers, Kings & Queens and The Dictators. He lives in Tunbridge Wells.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dale, Iain

Leseproben

Introduction

If you’ve read Charles Moore’s magisterial and brilliantly written three-volume account of Margaret Thatcher’s life, I’m tempted to advise you to stop here. This short biography is not for you.

If, on the other hand, you are like my personal trainer, Aaron Fowle, then you should read on. I had broken my hip and had gone to my local gym in Tunbridge Wells for some physiotherapy. Part of this was a weekly session with Aaron. He asked me what I did for a living, so I told him I presented a news and politics show on LBC radio each evening. Aaron then said: ‘So Margaret Thatcher… I’ve heard of her, but who was she? What did she do?’ Aaron was twenty-five at the time. He’s an intelligent guy, so I said I’d write this book for people like him who weren’t adults when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. People like an Italian friend of mine, Alessio, who is a keen young historian, but also, like many of his generation, is quite prepared to believe many of the myths that have grown up surrounding Margaret Thatcher’s beliefs and motivations.

This book, and indeed this series of Swift Press books, is not meant to cover every aspect of the life and career of the Prime Minister in question. The aim is simple: to introduce Margaret Thatcher to a new generation – one that lives basking in the glory of her achievements, or was formed in the shadow of her failures, depending on how one views the eleven and a half years of her rule.

She came to power two generations ago, and left office in 1990, before many of this book’s readers will have been born. For historical comparison, imagine I was writing a similar book in 1924, but on Benjamin Disraeli.

The longer a world statesman has been dead, and Margaret Thatcher died more than a decade ago, in 2013, the greater their mythology becomes. As time goes on, fewer people who worked with them survive to correct the myths. Margaret Thatcher is both a victim and a beneficiary of this phenomenon. She was a woman of tremendous paradoxes.

Yes, she was in many ways a conviction politician. She had a basic set of core beliefs and morals, and rarely strayed from them. Once she determined a course of action, it was difficult to persuade her away from it. Yet she was also a pragmatist, someone who was willing to be persuaded by the force of argument. She delighted in her reputation as an ‘Iron Lady’, the epithet given to her by a Soviet newspaper in 1977. Yet she could also be emotional, and even tearful, when confronted by personal or national tragedy.

She could be brutal in some of her dealings with her male ministerial colleagues, yet legion are the stories of her personal kindnesses to them and their families, as well as to her Downing Street staff.

She was known as a monetarist, classical laissez-faire liberal, yet she started out as a social conservative, and wasn’t averse to state intervention when she felt it was warranted.

Her reputation as a cabinet leader was one of being quasi-dictatorial, yet she left her ministers to get on with their jobs, far more than any of her successors ever have. She liked to win an argument, but relished having one. Many was the junior minister who emerged from an argument with her imagining he had ruined his chances of promotion, only to find a few months later that he had been elevated.

She was just as much of an enigma in foreign policy, and there are equally as many misunderstandings about her motives. Many still believe she was a supporter of apartheid in South Africa, yet the facts offer a different version of history. As we shall see in Chapter 9, she played a big role in bringing apartheid to an end, as evidenced by the British ambassador, Robin Renwick, and the fact that Nelson Mandela thanked her for it.

The myth also grew that the Falklands War and the so-called ‘Falklands factor’ was the main reason she won the 1983 general election. The fact is that by April 1982 the economy was starting to turn round, and so were the opinion polls.

Disraeli is said to have created the modern Conservative Party, although I would give the Earl of Derby at least equal billing for that particular accolade. Disraeli’s reputation has been burnished over the 150 years since his death to an extent which defies the historical record. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher has suffered quite the reverse, although internationally she is still viewed as a colossus.

Even thirty-five years after she left office, her legacy is still cited as being at the root of many a modern-day British failure. There is an element of truth in the belief that she still dominates British politics and the economic settlement. She regarded Tony Blair as her proudest achievement, and with good reason. He went down plenty of policy roads which would have caused a degree of queasiness in her later life, but Blair never questioned the basis of the Thatcher economic and industrial settlement. Nor has any government since. Nor do Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.

In this way, 1979 can be seen as a real political and economic turning point for Britain. Gone was the cosy consensus of so-called ‘Butskellism’, the amalgamation of the politics of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, the unspoken agreement between successive Conservative and Labour administrations that the job of government was to manage Britain’s economic and international decline. Margaret Thatcher was having none of that. By the time she came to power she had had the best part of five years to prepare for it. She knew that establishment forces in the political, economic and media worlds would be set against her. She knew a large part of her own party would oppose her. She knew she would have to crack a few heads together and court unpopularity, particularly in the early years. There would be huge pressures on her, not least from the majority of her cabinet, to execute economic U-turns when the going got tough. ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning,’ she told her 1980 party conference, with her predecessor Edward Heath looking on and glowering.

It was her ability to use language to turn a threat into an opportunity that stood her in good stead almost to the end. Harold Wilson was the first British Prime Minister to understand the power of television and how it could be utilised to his political advantage, but it was Margaret Thatcher who exploited it innovatively and ruthlessly. She was the undoubted mistress of the photo opportunity, both in election campaigns and on foreign visits. Pictures really did tell a thousand words. The best example of this came just prior to the 1987 general election, when she visited the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Moscow. Dressed in a fur-lined coat and Russian-style fur hat she brought Red Square to a standstill as she went on a spontaneous walkabout. Cheering Russian crowds gave her television pictures to die for. These provided a total contrast to her Labour opponent, Neil Kinnock, who had recently returned from a trip to Washington DC, where he had been humiliated by President Reagan, who had no hesitation in criticising the Labour Party policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Any Prime Minister whose premiership spans three decades is going to make mistakes and errors of judgement. Margaret Thatcher was no exception, and this book will not shy away from them.

The introduction of the Community Charge, which became known as the ‘Poll Tax’, was chief among them, and directly led to her downfall. Not allowing local councils to reinvest the financial gains from the sale of council houses in new housing stock was another one, which has partly led to the problems the country is experiencing today with lack of supply. The introduction of Section 28 of the Local Government Act in 1988, which sought to ban the promotion of homosexuality in schools, was a catastrophic misjudgement which still blights the Conservative Party’s record on social reform to this day. The fact that Thatcher was one of only a handful of Conservative MPs to have voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 is completely ignored or forgotten.

She placed far too much reliance on the political judgement of Tory whips, who recommended all the junior ministerial appointments. Invariably they promoted so-called Tory ‘wets’ to the government rather than members of her praetorian guard. Even at the end, she still didn’t enjoy majority support in her own cabinet. There was only one person to blame for that. Her. She hated reshuffles and continually appointed the wrong people to the wrong jobs, storing up many problems for later.

There can be little doubt that by the time she left office, Margaret Thatcher had lost that deep connection to public opinion which had served her so well over the previous decade. It was the Westland crisis over the future of a small helicopter company in the West Country in early 1986 which signalled the start of the decline. Indeed, she contemplated resigning at the time, but was saved from humiliation by a poor House of Commons speech by the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Eighteen months later, she went on to win a 100-seat majority in a general election, but it was never the same again. The strength of character which voters had so respected transformed into an apparent haughty imperiousness. It was summed up when she commented on the birth of a grandson by declaring to the TV cameras: ‘We have become a grandmother.’ She began to alienate even her closest supporters. When the TV interviewer Brian Walden, who had been a close confidant, accused her of coming across as if she were ‘slightly off her trolley’ following the resignation of Chancellor Nigel Lawson, he was cast into outer...