I always found it hard to judge Mrs. Thatcher dispassionately, because she was so like my mother. They looked and sounded similar—shortish urgent women who moved with purpose. From large hair, their faces narrowed downward; they had receding chins that appeared weak and strong at once. Force of will made them courageously disagreeable. They were born two years apart (Thatcher in 1925, my mother in 1927), came from modest, fiercely principled Nonconformist religious backgrounds, and saw life as a ladder that everyone must climb, from evil to goodness, from error to correction, from the lower social classes to the higher ones. Estranged from their native accents, they spoke in their grander borrowed ones a little carefully—as if, having learned their elocution lessons, they were now giving them. Both women were complex feminists, of a kind, who didn’t use the term, preferred men to women, and coddled their sons over their daughters. And both powerful women married supportive men named Denis.
The degree of my hostility for Mrs. Thatcher—political, but also affective—troubled me, because it cast a cold shadow over my filial love. Yet I was hardly alone. The entire country seemed to be passionately insane about Thatcher and Thatcherism. I was thirteen when she became Prime Minister, in 1979, so all my adolescence was spent under her long reign. She was still Britain’s leader when I left university, in 1988. Where I grew up, in the North of England, her name was uttered bitterly. We were twenty miles from Newcastle, stalked by once powerful industries—steel, shipbuilding, coal—that Thatcherism eyed as chronically sick, inimical to progress, and infested with unionist leftism. During the bloody miners’ strike of 1984-85, men and women collected money every Saturday in the market square of my home town with signs that asked us to “Dig deep for the miners.” In those days, there was no such thing as political indifference—that would be allowable only in the next decade, the era after the fall of Communism, the era of steady Third Way prosperity, when history had been called off. Of course, we couldn’t be dispassionate: Margaret Thatcher breathed over the country like a great parental god. She wanted her nation to be as ambitious, successful, hardworking, thrifty, and right-principled as she was, and to those ends she hectored, wounded, pushed, and inspired.
“Force of personality was the most striking thing about her—almost too powerful for easy rational discussion,” a political colleague of hers said. It’s the dominant theme in the more than two thousand pages of Charles Moore’s authorized biography, now completed by its third volume, “Herself Alone” (Knopf), which chronicles a political downfall brought about by a force of personality too large for rational discussion. As early as 1981, one of Thatcher’s advisers complained that she bullied her weaker colleagues: “You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials. . . . You give little praise or credit.” “If this is the best you can do,” she told Geoffrey Howe, a long-abused Cabinet minister, “then I’d better send you to hospital and deliver the statement myself.” On one occasion, when she became particularly “strident,” the Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had to remind her, “I am not a member of your government, I am the head of a sovereign nation!” But she could just as easily rebuke entire nations, genders, or both at once. “You men, you’re all so weak,” she spat at some Dutch representatives after an episode of failed European negotiation. Robin Butler, her principal private secretary, confessed that “dealing with her face to face was like feeding a fierce animal.” Moore, who has an excellent eye for anecdotes and a Gibbonian way with footnotes, buries one of the best of such tales at the bottom of a page in his second volume. Once, at a meeting, when she compared something to “Waiting for Godot,” and pronounced “Godot” with a hard “t,” Lord Carrington, her first Foreign Secretary, whispered to her, “It’s pronounced ‘Godo,’ Prime Minister.” How is it spelled? she asked. Carrington spelled it out. “Then it’s ‘Godot,’ ” she replied, enunciating the “t” with even greater distinctness.
Some of the squeamishness she prompted can be attributed to male chauvinism and Tory patrician snobbery; Moore, a right-wing columnist for the Daily Telegraph and a former editor of The Spectator, likes to use this defense when Thatcher is at her most indefensible, soothingly reminding us of her role as the great disrupter of the old boys’ club and its afternoon fug. This is undeniable, though snobbery seems generally to have topped misogyny among her detractors. Carrington, a suave old Etonian diplomat, once exclaimed, “If I have any more trouble from this fucking stupid, petit-bourgeois woman, I’m going to go.” Thatcher reminded Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the aquiline French President, of a tiresome English nanny his family had once employed.
Snobbery she could do nothing about. But the Westminster club remained a stiflingly male one in large part because Thatcher, across eleven years and three administrations, appointed just one woman to her Cabinet, and to a politically irrelevant post at that. The women she encountered, insofar as they appear in Moore’s biography at all, seem likely to have joined the men in their patterns of fascination and recoil. We aren’t told what her mother thought of her, but Margaret’s emphatic sidelining of the maternal influence—“I loved my mother dearly but after I was fifteen we had nothing more to say to each other”—shades in a sad mutual attrition. Geoffrey Howe’s wife, Elspeth, detested Thatcher, and faulted her for having, especially around women, “Queen Bee syndrome—I made it. Others can jolly well do the same.” Even Queen Elizabeth shared the general squeamishness; seven years into Thatcher’s rule, she let it be known through her press secretary that she considered the Prime Minister to be “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.”
In the opening pages of “The Rainbow,” D. H. Lawrence describes the long rhythms of traditional agricultural life in Nottinghamshire. The men, he suggests, stay close to the ground in wordless communion, and do not yearn for a significant life beyond their elemental work. The women are “different.” They look out and up, at the horizon, “to the spoken world beyond”—to the village, with its church and hall and school. For Lawrence, the woman is the ever-restless agent of social change. Margaret Thatcher, born ten years after the publication of “The Rainbow,” in the neighboring county of Lincolnshire, into the same religious Nonconformism that shaped Lawrence (and, before him, George Eliot), belonged to that sorority. With astonishing enterprise and intelligence, she treated her lower-middle-class background as a problem to be solved. It isn’t surprising that her schoolmates thought her accent was “affected” and that she had about her “a smug perfection”: she would not be held back; she was not going to stay in the rural town of Grantham.
She looked out and up; she instinctively agreed with Mr. Vincy, in “Middlemarch,” who announces that “it’s a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little.” Thatcher’s father, the deeply pious Alfred Roberts, was a shopkeeper, and she was born into modest circumstances above the corner store in Grantham. The family house lacked a yard, hot water, and an indoor lavatory. But Roberts was also a lay preacher, and later became an alderman and the town’s mayor. Ascent, for Margaret, wasn’t merely a matter of sorority, then; she studied her father’s public speaking. At Oxford, she was one of only five women in her year studying chemistry. Called to the bar in 1954, she was the first woman in her mentor’s law chambers. She chose tax law, because, as a young mother, she needed a regular schedule—a year earlier, she had given birth to twins, Mark and Carol. She evidently went into the law because it was the familiar (male) path to a career in politics.
Her deep understanding of middle- and working-class social aspiration, revolutionary in the placidly entitled world of Conservative Party politics, is what kept her in power for so long, and is also her greatest legacy. She figured out that the labor movement, conservatism’s traditional radical foe, had itself become conservative: it wanted too many things to stay the same. Arthur Scargill, the militant leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, said that his members’ strike was taken in defense of the right of their sons and grandsons to go down the mine. Almost two decades earlier, Mrs. Thatcher, then a young M.P., had said that if she were “given a choice” she would not send her son down a pit. It was perilous and unhealthy: in 1967, three miners were killed a week. The important word there is “choice,” something exercised, in 1993, by the same Arthur Scargill, when he tried to buy a London council flat (the equivalent of public housing), under a right-to-buy policy that Mrs. Thatcher pioneered in the early nineteen-eighties.
There is an unavoidable sense of strategic efficiency about her domestic life. Margaret Roberts was twenty-three when she met Denis Thatcher, and she reported back to her sister thus: “Major Thatcher, who has a flat in London (age about 36, plenty of money) was also dining and he drove me back to town at midnight. As one would expect he is a perfect gentleman. Not a very attractive creature—very reserved but quite nice.” With admirable evolutionary shrewdness, the right mate was being selected: Margaret’s husband, who had means from the family paint-and-preservatives business he managed, would prove to be impressively supportive, and canny at backing out of the limelight. Friends said that it was a solid marriage but no great love affair. “She was pleased to have twins, but more because it meant that she need not get pregnant again than because of a wild enthusiasm for motherhood” is Moore’s dry comment. Not that Denis compensated with any wild enthusiasm for fatherhood. “I just wished the little buggers had been drowned at birth,” he said years later, when asked about his children. He was watching cricket at the Oval when they were born. Mark and Carol were dispatched to boarding schools at the ages of eight and nine, respectively, and Margaret Thatcher entered Parliament, in 1959, as a Conservative M.P. for the North London constituency of Finchley. Her steady rise to power had begun.
Thatcher’s singular mission was political. Such single-mindedness, which is hoarded eccentricity, is easy to dislike—it so isn’t like us. Yet one can only marvel at the determination and the fortitude needed to surmount the slights and obstacles of that time. Nearly every normal habit of life—engaged parenthood, sibling loyalty, marital intimacy, deep friendship, ordinary social intercourse—gave way to the achievement of that one thing. Denis Healey, a brilliant Labour politician of Thatcher’s generation, thought that politicians needed to have a “hinterland”; he said that he had always been as interested in music, poetry, and painting as he was in politics. The English idea of the nonchalant gentleman-amateur—Harold Macmillan calmly reading Jane Austen, and so on—had always presupposed such hinterlands. You had one foot in Downing Street and the other in your country-house library. It was a tradition of male affluence, to be sure, and Thatcher might well have felt that she couldn’t let her guard down. Or perhaps she just had no hinterland. And no innerland, either: in all of Moore’s thousands of pages, there is not the slightest stirring of interiority. What Margaret Thatcher felt privately about God, or death, or a beautiful phrase of music, or love, or sex, or a sad movie, or the great blessings of having children, or the beauties of foreign cities, or the anguish of suffering, is not recorded. Her soul was shuttered.
But how hard she worked at that one thing, and with what steely ministration! Moore provides an example from the beginning of her career. Junior members of Parliament are encouraged to propose their own bills; the gesture announces a freshman’s seriousness of intention. The young Thatcher found a subject—she devised a bill that would force Labour councils to open up their proceedings to the public (including newspapers involved in labor disputes). But she identified an impediment to its passage. On Fridays, when such bills were debated, M.P.s were often absent. Thatcher wrote individually to two hundred and fifty of her Conservative colleagues—“I have always believed in the impact of a personal, handwritten letter”—asking them to stay in Westminster; her private-member’s bill was carried by an overwhelming margin. About a decade later, in the early seventies, she joined Prime Minister Edward Heath’s Cabinet as Education Secretary. When Heath lost the general election of 1974, she made a bid for leader of the Conservative Party, and won, in February, 1975. Just over four years after that, she became, as Moore says, “the first elected woman leader in the Western world.”
Colleagues were astounded at how thoroughly she could master briefing material. She needed little sleep, and worked late into the night. In 1984, when the I.R.A. bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Prime Minister was staying for the annual Conservative Party Conference, she was polishing her keynote speech at the moment her suite’s bathroom exploded, at 2:50 a.m. On a twenty-four-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington, D.C., in a government jet equipped with a bed, she told Robin Butler that, while he could go to sleep, she was going to stay awake for the entire journey while she studied the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. She intently marked up everything that came her way, blitzing her colleagues’ internal memos and policy proposals with double and triple underlinings, groaning castigations, and flat prohibitions: “No,” “Very disappointing & sketchy,” “This is awful.” Vacations provoked something like bewildered impatience; in his long chronicle, Moore eventually flourishes a droll shorthand for these recurrent challenges: “For her customary but always unwelcome summer holidays, Mrs. Thatcher . . . ”
Indeed, what emerges from these impeccably researched, coolly absorbing volumes are two Margaret Thatchers, whom we might call the scientist and the atavist. For the scientist Thatcher, the chemist who had studied with Dorothy Hodgkin at university, knowledge existed to be mastered, made use of, leveraged. This Thatcher had read Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” at Oxford, and at opportune moments would pull his “Constitution of Liberty” out of her handbag. Christmas of 1975 found her doggedly continuing her anti-communist “holiday reading”: “The Possessed” and “Darkness at Noon.” This Thatcher was genuinely interested in whether Mikhail Gorbachev could reform Soviet Communism; she coaxed and encouraged him before any other Western leader dared to, and engaged him in passionate, freewheeling colloquies. (Their first lasted six hours.) She convened what were essentially academic seminars on the Soviet Union at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence (with guests such as the British historians Robert Conquest and Hugh Thomas and the Columbia University scholar Seweryn Bialer).
The scientist surrounded herself with intelligent men (Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph, Douglas Hurd), and approached Britain’s manifold woes at the start of the nineteen-eighties with an unsentimental willingness to push experiment to the edge of cruelty. Britain was teetering: the figures still astonish. Interest rates in 1979 reached seventeen per cent and inflation a staggering eighteen per cent. Nationalized industries were sluggish and fabulously costly to the taxpayer. British Leyland, the automotive conglomerate that included Jaguar, Triumph, and Austin Rover, was producing comically dreadful cars and had consumed about two hundred million pounds a year in government subsidies. Many of these companies approached customer satisfaction like the proprietor in the Monty Python cheese-shop sketch: “Normally, sir, yes, but today the van broke down.” Moore, in one of his footnotes, remembers trying to get a phone installed in 1981, and being told by British Telecom that it would take six months, owing to a “shortage of numbers.” As Howe, Thatcher’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, noted in his budget speech of June, 1979, Britain’s share of world trade in 1954 had been equal to that of France and Germany combined. Now the French and German share was three times bigger than Britain’s.
Controlling expenditure and the money supply was part hypothesis (Thatcher’s fabled monetarism, which she got from Milton Friedman) and part common sense: uncontrolled inflation, like religion, poisons everything. A system that was increasing miners’ pay by nearly ten per cent a year was clearly unsustainable. Since many of the major industries (including railways, coal, telecommunications, and a good chunk of automobile production) were nationalized, the government was effectively acting as a giant employer. But since many weren’t profitable, it was also acting as a giant bank. The country had apparently wandered into the worst of two worlds: nationalization of the means of production (largely achieved by Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government) could offer no magical respite from the market—which had decided, for instance, that it didn’t want badly made British cars—and so it simply insured that capitalism was being done poorly. As a remedy, Thatcher and her ministers embarked on a campaign of privatization, releasing British Gas, British Airways, British Telecom, BP, and British Leyland from government control.
Government subvention had fended off the ravages of capitalism in one important way: it had provided steady employment. Now the country’s unemployment rate rose; it hit a high of thirteen per cent in 1984, and was still seven per cent in 1990, the year of Thatcher’s ouster. Thatcher’s calculation was that widespread unemployment was an unavoidable fact of economic reform, that certain jobs would have to be the mulch that went into the revival of the general economic habitat. Apart from the profound human misery that resulted, there was an enduring political cost—much of Scotland, Wales, and the North of England remains lost to Conservatives. This was the Thatcher who maintained that there was “no such thing as society,” only individuals, “and people must look to themselves first,” a statement that Moore attempts, with little luck, to wrestle from its infamy. That unequal society tended toward ugly extremes, with great new impoverishment and great new enrichment. Still, the new order created undeniable economic expansion (an average G.D.P. growth rate of 3.2 per cent in the nineteen-eighties), and Thatcher was reëlected in 1983 and 1987, the first Prime Minister after universal suffrage, Moore notes, to win three elections.
Alas, the atavist Thatcher was a different creature, and the atavist gradually consumed the scientist, because the scientist drank her own potion, the one marked “ideology.” The atavist had been happy to be called a “reactionary,” before she became Prime Minister. The atavist complained publicly about Britain’s being “swamped” by immigrants; never, as far as we know, used the National Health Service herself and wanted to convert it to an American-style insurance-based system; believed in capital punishment; agreed with her husband that the BBC was infested with left-wing “pinkos”; supported legislation prohibiting local government authorities from “promoting” homosexuality; refused to countenance any meaningful political progress in Northern Ireland; vehemently opposed German reunification; was virtually alone among world leaders in opposing sanctions on the South African apartheid regime; and called the A.N.C. “a typical terrorist organization.” The atavist stopped listening to her colleagues, and deeply distrusted her civil servants (particularly at the Foreign Office), whom she worked around or behind whenever she could. The atavist was the possessor of what one colleague called “a very English Englishness”: she didn’t sacrifice Scotland and Wales as part of a Conservative strategy; she hardly noticed they were there.
Europe was the great theatre of this very English Englishness. Throughout Mrs. Thatcher’s career, Moore observes, “the story of 1940 was the myth which most dominated her imagination.” It is the Dunkirk story, and not wholly mythical: Nazis rampant in Europe, Paris vanquished, Britain alone as the last bulwark of Western civilization, while the air flashed with Spitfires and Churchill growled in the Commons. Margaret Roberts was fifteen, and Britain would never be as noble again—unless it was in 1982, when she led the country to victory over Argentina during the Falklands War, and quoted the Duke of Wellington: “There is no such thing as a little war for a great nation.” The refusal to accept Britain’s diminishment, the refusal merely to “manage the decline,” was central to Thatcher’s pugilism, and it is the reason for her Churchillian status among contemporary Conservatives.
Yet the question that devoured her career, and remains grievously unresolved to this day, is whether Britain is a greater nation inside or outside the European Union. Remainers and assorted economic pragmatists tend to argue that the right question is whether Britain is a richer nation inside Europe or out; greatness will have to look after itself. Brexiteers reply that greatness cannot look after itself when the nation’s sovereignty is curtailed. Thatcher appears to have been one of those economic pragmatists for a brief period, when Great Britain voted by referendum to stay in the European Economic Community, in 1975, and she saw the economic possibilities of a large internal market. Soon she grew dismayed by French and German plans for greater integration, a European Central Bank and single currency, and the borderless utopia that sought to banish nationalist rivalry and bloodshed. To her, it all smacked of socialism. It deprived nations of their ability to control their own currencies and interest rates; it favored burgeoning German and French power; it operated by élite consensus and an irritating sort of mild bureaucratic snuffling.
Some of these objections were reasonable, but it’s hard to resist the idea that the core of Thatcher’s hostility to Europe was flamingly unreasonable, almost exceeding articulate discourse. It is unreasonable to credit nuclear weapons—but not the E.U.—for keeping the peace in modern Europe, as Thatcher did. Moore, a prominent Brexiteer, herniates himself in his effort to defend his subject in this area, assuring us that Thatcher “was not, in any general sense, anti-European,” to which the reply might be: no, only in many specific senses. The first speech she gave as Party leader, in 1975, pushed against the notion that Britain had become “a poor nation whose only greatness lies in the past.” Yet a frozen allegiance to the myth of 1940 rather guarantees a nostalgia for the greatness of the past. The theme was struck repeatedly. “How dare they! We saved all their necks in the war,” she exclaimed at a European summit in 1984, apparently annoyed by the spectacle of European foreign ministers idly drinking coffee and “swapping funny stories.”
Her deep suspicion of all things German became more vociferous once German reunification loomed. She saw greater European unity, Moore says, “not as a solution for German power, but as a cloak for it.” She had a map of Europe in her handbag, marked up with a black circle around Germany, and another, even warier circle around the German-speaking peoples of Europe. The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl reportedly joked to her at a 1990 meeting that, at the recent World Cup semifinal, the Germans had apparently beaten England “at their national game,” only to have Thatcher reply that “the English had beaten the Germans at theirs twice in the twentieth century.” But it was Kohl who accurately diagnosed the problem: “She thinks history is not just. Germany is so rich and Great Britain is struggling. They won a war but lost an empire and their economy.”
Increasingly, her colleagues and civil servants worked around her. Officials at the Foreign Office privately noted her “Germanophobia” and her “obsessions about the European Community and Germany.” One minister, Douglas Hurd, complained that Cabinet meetings now involved three orders of business: “parliamentary affairs; home affairs; and xenophobia.” The greatest pressure was felt by Geoffrey Howe, who became her Foreign Secretary in 1983. A loyal colleague from the earliest days of her leadership and an architect of the first Thatcher economic plan, he was perhaps the last person you would have selected to spend long hours by the Prime Minister’s side, as she sliced her way through flabby world gatherings. Thickly bespectacled, deferential, gently overweight, and meek of manner, he spoke in a civil murmur, a kind of clerical stutter that unfailingly cast a sleeping spell over the entire nation. Denis Healey said that being attacked by Howe was “like being savaged by a dead sheep.” Howe was a lawyerly civil servant who had been mysteriously transferred to the front lines of partisan politics. Where Thatcher craved decision, Howe preferred deferment; where Thatcher disrupted, he convened. He favored consensus, formulas, protocols, quietly stagnant back channels.
He was also decent, capable, and well liked. Perhaps she needed him around, in an odd-couple way, as her reliable negative: find out what Geoffrey would do, and then do the opposite. Moore speculates that she despised his “unmanliness,” a shrewd surmise given her Lady Macbeth-like disdain for the slightest “wobbliness” in masculinity. She regularly rebuked him in front of his peers. At one of the Chequers seminars on the Soviet Union, she called out, “Don’t worry, Geoffrey. We know exactly what you’re going to say.” After a memorial service for her old friend Ian Gow, at which Howe had delivered the eulogy, she upbraided him in front of Gow’s grieving sons: “Why don’t you speak up, Geoffrey? You mumble.” Howe had been distressed by Thatcher’s opposition to South African sanctions—he feared that Britain would be seen as “the sole defender of apartheid”—and now he grew convinced that Thatcher was attempting to turn the Conservative Party into an anti-European tank. On November 1, 1990, she again reprimanded him in front of his colleagues; later that day, he resigned. He did not go quietly. The resignation speech he delivered at the House of Commons (declaring that Thatcher’s “perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation”) led Tories to move against her leadership.
Once Mrs. Thatcher’s fall had begun, the toppling was fast. But perhaps it had really started earlier—when, in October of 1989, she fell out with Commonwealth leaders on the question of South African sanctions, and said, “If it is one against forty-eight, I am very sorry for the forty-eight.” Or when her second Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, resigned a few days later, complaining that she “just doesn’t listen any more.” Or in March, 1990, when some of the worst rioting in modern British history swept through central London, as thousands of citizens protested the new poll tax. Or when inflation rates and unemployment began to rise, in the same year. And how curious that Thatcher, whose oft-repeated mantra was “Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,” could not or would not see this. Everyone else, it seems, was aware of what Moore nicely calls the “growing fin de régime feeling.” Parties exist to win elections. Miraculously, she had won three elections; now she imperilled the fourth: Labour was polling between sixteen and twenty-one percentage points ahead of the Conservatives. So she faced a leadership challenge and resigned, on November 28, 1990. Two years later, under her successor, John Major, the Conservatives won the election that had looked so grim for them.
She was a violently political animal, and when the hunt was taken from her she dwindled away into a cruelly permanent winter that finally erased her only self. Her private secretary Charles Powell thought that she never had a happy day once she left power. Friends and admirers did their best, setting her up with houses and assistants—one wealthy donor sent her flowers once a week for the rest of her life. She signed up with a speakers’ bureau, formed the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, and travelled the world in the remunerative manner—as a kind of auctioned icon—that is now grimly customary among former world leaders, but was then unusual. Her politics, simmering away untended, thickened into solid reductions: she became ever more fervently opposed to E.U. membership. She defended the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, an old ally, when, visiting Britain for medical treatment, he was placed under house arrest in compliance with a Spanish warrant. Once presciently interested in climate change—the scientist Thatcher had organized an early conference, in 1989, devoted to “Saving the Ozone Layer,” and a subsequent seminar at which she sat with the environmentalist James Lovelock—she appeared to recant it all in the book “Statecraft” (2002), a dull collection of right-wing speeches and anecdotes. The atavist now decried the issue as little more than an excuse for the promotion of “worldwide, supranational socialism.”
Colleagues noticed her declining capacities. Giving a speech in 2000, she repeated the same joke three times. She suffered a mini-stroke at the end of 2001, and another early in 2002, temporarily losing the power of speech. Denis Thatcher, mysteriously kept alive by a stern regimen of nightly gin-and-tonics and two packs a day, died in 2003, at the age of eighty-eight. His absence caused further bewilderment: “I must go home now and get his supper,” she sometimes exclaimed. As her dementia deepened, her temperament sweetened; I saw the same change in my own mother, who followed Mrs. Thatcher in this regard, and who, born two years after her, died a year after her, in 2014. Almost mute, uncannily gentle, and patient as she had rarely been in the fullness of her life, Mrs. Thatcher would—it is one of the most poignant details in Charles Moore’s account—sit for hours in front of a certain painting at the Oxfordshire estate of a wealthy friend. The painting was a Victorian scene, titled “The Leamington Hunt—Mr Harry Bradley’s Hounds,” by John Frederick Herring. She liked counting the dogs.
Dementia’s whittling seems crueller when the oak once stood as tall as Thatcher did. Her fiercest opponents could not be unmoved by Moore’s last pages. But a cold eye is required for her legacy, which has been calamitous. Brexit is always at the center of it, and yet almost the least of it. She split her own party, but she also split the Labour Party (with plenty of assistance from that great Thatcher admirer Tony Blair). After all, her opposition to the European Union wasn’t just about Europhobia; it had to do with her visceral Americophilia. When she flew to Washington, D.C., in 1981 to proclaim her ardor for the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, she was not only announcing an ideological kinship but binding her country to the larger power. “America’s successes will be our successes,” she declaimed. “Your problems will be our problems.” That promise was tragically fulfilled when Tony Blair decided to join George Bush’s invasion of Iraq—a decision that fatefully weakened Blair’s party.
Thatcher legitimated a new kind of inequality; she protected and coddled Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing press, which returned the favor with blind support; she ignored and undermined her civil service, especially at the Foreign Office; she divided politics into a purity war of loyalists and enemies; she stopped being the leader of one nation; she “disrupted.” Alas, these are now very familiar woes, with their own familiar rhetoric. As David Cameron put it when she died, “She made our country great again.” ♦
